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"This is a guest post by Aseem Kishore, a technology enthusiast and lead blogger for Online-Tech-Tips.\nFriendFeed has come a long way in a short amount of time. In the beginning, it was just a fancy RSS aggregator with commenting thrown into the mix. However, over time, FriendFeed has added a slew of great features which has lead many to think that it will be the this year's Twitter (if it isn't already).  \nThe interesting aspect of FriendFeed is its quick evolution from a lifestreaming service to lifestreaming plus discussion forum plus latest news plus search engine. Here are 10 reasons why I think FriendFeed will beat out their competition if they keep innovating at their current pace:\n\n1. Noise Reduction \u2013 One of the main gripes about FriendFeed in the beginning was simply the sheer number of comments and links that were being duplicated by all the Twitter refugees. Also, at startup, FriendFeed would plaster the same nine prolific social media users (Scoble, Rubel, etc) on the front page whenever a new account was created causing the Friends feed to be completely overwhelmed.\nHowever, two great FriendFeed features easily solved the problem: the hide function and advanced filtering. The hide function is extremely customizable in FriendFeed and allows you to hide individual entries, hide all entries from a specific service (Flickr, Netflix, etc), hide a specific user's service, hide friends of a friend updates, or hide all entries unless they have comments or likes.\n\n2. Breaking News \u2013 Like Twitter, FriendFeed is fast-becoming a great way to find out the latest breaking news or most popular topics on the Web. With the release of the personalized recommendations feature, you can find entries posted by your friends based on how interesting the rest of the network finds them.\nIn this way, you can find the most commented or bookmarked items quickly. Currently it only works with your friends network, but it will hopefully be expanded to everyone so that you can see the most popular items across the entire network.\n3. Search Engine \u2013 With so many useful links and comments in your Friend feed, the service would be severely hampered without the ability to search. Simply go to the Advanced Search page, type a search phrase (\"Microsoft acquires\", etc) and choose \"Shared by everyone.\"\nYou can search all services and users, including Twitter and blog entries, or limit the search to a specific service or specific user. You can use the advanced search to quickly find peers with similar interests, such as all users who shared Flickr photos of dogs or users who liked the latest Britney Spears album. The search is becoming ever more useful as more content is added to the site.\n4. Rooms - With the introduction of Rooms in May, FriendFeed finally became very useful to me. Rooms are places to carry on conversations about specific topics with a smaller number of people. It can be used to carry on niche conversations between like-minded people or it can be used privately by a development team or family and friends. Another great way to reduce noise and get the personalized information you want.\n\nThe number of rooms has increased dramatically and the information you can find in these rooms is simply amazing. As FriendFeed continues to add more filtering and recommendation services, the ability to use the service for personalized purposes has grown dramatically.\nRooms can be used to reduce noise, create a discussion forum, for link aggregation, to plan events, and even for technical support. I'm sure we'll see many other uses of rooms in the future.\n5. Distributed Comments - Way back in March, FriendFeed released a feature whereby you could simply check a box and any FriendFeed comment would be sent to Twitter in a single step. It's a powerful feature that combines the best features of both services into a single interface. Since many bigger conversations are moving to services like Twitter and FriendFeed, this assures that the conversation will continue no matter which service you use.\nAnd even though less conversations are happening on blogs, there are still many comments on FriendFeed about blog posts. Luckily, someone created a plugin for both Wordpress and Blogger that allows blogs to integrate FriendFeed comments into blog posts. Readers can also comment on and like your posts directly from a form displayed under the FriendFeed comment.\nThis allows comments and discussions to flourish anywhere, not just on the FriendFeed service.\n6. Two-way API - What's really going to help boost FriendFeed past the competition is their powerful API, which allows developers to extend the features and functions of the aggregation service. The API exposes just about every function of the site and allows data to be read from or written back to FriendFeed.\nThe API has a very \"open\" philosophy and will help the site grow dramatically as data can be added to the site from not only their currently supported services, but also from many other smaller sites. The API will also make it a breeze to continue two way conversations on mobile devices, such as the iPhone. You can also add FriendFeed to your Facebook Page, iGoogle homepage, or even to your blog as a widget.\n7. Stats, data, and more - There are many lifestreaming applications out there, but FriendFeed does it so well and simplistically, that you get addicted to it. It's like Quicken or MS Money, but for your online life rather than your finances. I love Quicken (more recently Mint) because you get to see your finances broken down into nice little categories, figures, and numbers.\nFriendFeed doesn't have a ton of stats yet, but it's cool to see that 70% of my online activity is from my blog, 10% from Netflix, 3% from Picasa, and so on. It's also nice to see a quick overview of people I have found interesting and people who find me interesting based on comments and likes. As more services are integrated into FriendFeed, you'll be able to get a snapshot of your entire online activity from one location. Cool!\n8. Imaginary Friends - This is another feature that I just love about FriendFeed because it can be used in so many powerful ways that go beyond simple lifestreaming. Using Imaginary Friends, you can basically create a stream for anything, such as tracking RSS feeds, inbound links to your site, Twitter replies, and lots more.\nThe above-mentioned are more advanced uses, but you can also use the feature to simply track when a friend who is not on FriendFeed publishes a new photo to Flickr or submits a link to Digg, etc.\n9. Peer Trust &amp; Search - This is not really a feature of FriendFeed, but a concept that seems to be a possible future to search: easily searchable content created by people you trust. Yes you can search Google for the latest trends in your industry or you can get on FriendFeed and have discussions, find links, read news/posts and do lots more with the people who are actually in that industry and can give more relevant content than Google. Which is better?\nObviously, it can never replace a search engine, but complementing normal search results with recommendations from trusted peers seems like a worthwhile idea.\n10. Innovation - Finally, I think FriendFeed will beat out their competitors simply because they are quick to innovate. It's one of the few online services I've seen that roll out new features so quickly. From search to personalized recommendations to rooms to the API, if FriendFeed continues at this pace, we can except it's usefulness to increase exponentially.\nFriendFeed definitely also has it's share of problems and limitations and that's something that should be discussed in the comments, but overall I think it's going to change the way we interact online, just like blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter did before it. What are your thoughts on FriendFeed?\nFriendFeed company profile provided by TradeVibes\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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