Friendfeed is rapidly growing from a life streaming content aggregator, to something much bigger then it set it out to be. If you look at the bigger picture, it’s becoming a free online social encyclopedia, or what I would call the Wikipedia of social networking.

Franklin Pettit recently blogged about Temperature Taking on Friendfeed. This is one of the many examples of how Friendfeed is being used as a powerful research and educational tool. You can post a question, and within minutes you can be assured someone will have a answer. An online social think tank at your disposal, where anyone can chime in and participate in the conversation, no matter there age, gender, race, educational background, social status etc. I have grown to use Friendfeed more and more for research on blog ideas, social media, social applications, etc. The more people you follow, the bigger your encyclopedia becomes. Let’s not forget the handy advanced search function. This is the most powerful tool on Friendfeed. This allows you to tap in to the brains of Friendfeed’s social encyclopedia. Cant find some thing in the search? Try joining one of the many rooms, focus groups.

Think about the 41 social services Friendfeed currently supports & archives. These 41 services databases are the core of the encyclopedia. These archived databases range from, blogs,news, videos, images, music, books and more. These databases are unique because they are built off of user submitted content rather then a robot crawling the web and extrapolating unnecessary and irrelevant data. Friendfeed has some of the brightest minds in the social media arena on board. These social editors are at the core, responsible for building this encyclopedia along with the masses. Almost any subject or topic relating to social networking or social media can be asked or found on Friendfeed thanks to the community and the 41 archived real time databases. Friendfeed is growing rather quickly. As more new users join and add their services, the encyclopedia grows. Friendfeed is run by ex Google engineers, this certainly does not hurt, because they come from the culture of “search technology”. As I have previously commented on Friendfeed, it is truly becoming a powerful research tool, in some aspects more powerful then Google. It’s amazing watching this rapid transformation take place. With that being said, if you are not a member on Friendfeed, join, particpate, and help build this online social encyclopedia.

How do you use Friendfeed?

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