Now that I have my established lists, the task of organizing begins. With several hundred subscriptions, the keyword is bulk management. FriendFeed allows you to bulk add friends to a desired list. However, it does not allow you to bulk remove friends off your primary home feed. This task is taking a considerable amount of time due to the removal of all my subscribers off my home feed, and into their appropriate lists. Currently this has to be done manually, as there is no bulk removal option in place for taking everyone off your home feed. Overall you will need to spend a decent amount of time organizing your lists to get the most efficiency out of them.
My question is, why and what do I need a home feed for?
Lists help tremendously, but still it is not the end all solution. You can’t truly use lists for topical breakdown because most people talk about multiple topics. This is an observation Mark Trapp voiced in this thread. I absolutely agree with Mark. I’m running into duplication issues now with lists. This is something I am trying to avoid with the elimination of my home feed as a starting point. Keywords would be a perfect solution for this problem. My ideal home feed would and should be based off keyword selection. I suspect we will see this implemented in the future on FriendFeed.
My List Management:
Page A: This is my FriendFeed all star page. Highly active members who I have established connections with and interact with daily. I often network with them on other social networks and platforms. This is my core inner network.
Page B: Members with moderate activity. Moderate for me is not also your posting frequency, but the content you post as well. I usually have a good tolerance level for topics such as politics and religion. However, when it overwhelms my feed, you will have then made it to the b-list.
Page C: Members with low activity. This also serves as a holding tank for members I have yet to classify, and who are newly subscribed to me and vice versa.
My other two categories are Social Media/Tech and Photography. These are self explanatory.
Duplicate detection:
Now when multiple friends share the same link, the set of duplicate entries will only show up once in your feed. There is an added bonus too, as quoted by Brett Taylor.
My favorite part of the dup detection is that it understands URL shorteners, so Tweets about blog posts will dup with the blog post itself. – Bret Taylor
Related posts:
Mike, with your separate A, B, and C pages, how often do you find yourself checking out the lower tiers? I have a somewhat similar setup, but I find myself essentially fake following the people outside the top tier.
This is extremely cool. I was meaning to ask how you did with the lists. As I said in an earlier comment; I feel that I'm missing out on a lot of good stuff by NOT having them sorted up…and, mind you, I have very few compared to you. Thank you for sharing this… I'll take time out and do this very soon and I think I'll get greatly rewarded..
Mark,with lists now I can check up on those people with a little more frequency. I check the lower tier lists about 3-5 times a day. My interaction is a lot lower, compared to page A. It basically equates to controlled fake following as you mentioned. List creation is forcing me/us to almost look at every members feed with a magnifying glass for proper categorization. This gives fake following a whole new dimension.
Rebkin, thank you. Lists will definitely give you a whole new view of FriendFeed. Spend a few mins of your day sorting through your subscriptions and organizing them. It's definitely worth the reward.
Mike, with your separate A, B, and C pages, how often do you find yourself checking out the lower tiers? I have a somewhat similar setup, but I find myself essentially fake following the people outside the top tier.
This is extremely cool. I was meaning to ask how you did with the lists. As I said in an earlier comment; I feel that I'm missing out on a lot of good stuff by NOT having them sorted up…and, mind you, I have very few compared to you. Thank you for sharing this… I'll take time out and do this very soon and I think I'll get greatly rewarded..
Mark,with lists now I can check up on those people with a little more frequency. I check the lower tier lists about 3-5 times a day. My interaction is a lot lower, compared to page A. It basically equates to controlled fake following as you mentioned. List creation is forcing me/us to almost look at every members feed with a magnifying glass for proper categorization. This gives fake following a whole new dimension.
Rebkin, thank you. Lists will defiantly give you a whole new view of FriendFeed. Spend a few mins of your day sorting through your subscriptions and organizing them. It's definitely worth the reward.
Mike, yet another great post and thanks for sharing your organization method. I have started to dip into organizing my FreiendFeed subscriptions into list as well, but find that keeping EVERYONE on the home page is still useful for the “flood.” Also, with keeping everyone in the home fed, I don't need to organize every last person in a list.
Tagging would be great and I'm guessing/hoping the Friendfeed team is working on it.
[...] feature is a great way to quickly scan items. Mike Fruchter recently wrote a blog post entitled My A,B,C’s of FriendFeed in which he describes the usefulness of FriendFeed [...]
Justin, Thank you. I'm still wrangling with what I will use the home feed for. If I do use the home feed, I want a clean slate. This is another reason why I'm doing away with it for the time being. It's a time consuming process building these blocks, but so far proving to be effective.
Mike, yet another great post and thanks for sharing your organization method. I have started to dip into organizing my FreiendFeed subscriptions into list as well, but find that keeping EVERYONE on the home page is still useful for the “flood.” Also, with keeping everyone in the home fed, I don't need to organize every last person in a list.
Tagging would be great and I'm guessing/hoping the Friendfeed team is working on it.
Justin, Thank you. I'm still wrangling with what I will use the home feed for. If I do use the home feed, I want a clean slate. This is another reason why I'm doing away with it for the time being. It's a time consuming process building these blocks, but so far proving to be effective.
I eventually found that my key RSS feeds failed to update and the FF widget was too limited so I defected to Lifestream.fm which supports more services and has a better widget.
I tried doing a 1-9 system for bloglines… it works for a while.
You know the problem, you can subscribe to someone who posts a REALLY good post in every 10 – perhaps with the other 9 being random stuff which gets in the way.
It IS very hard IMHO and perhaps even more in FF due to the dynamics of a lifestream/microblog.
I love ALL my friends in twitter, ff, bloglines, but i honestly don't always have time to check how their cat is doing after the operation and getting through that level of information – even when speedreading – can be VERY hard.
Wow, I need to update my lists. =)
I eventually found that my key RSS feeds failed to update and the FF widget was too limited so I defected to Lifestream.fm which supports more services and has a better widget.
I tried doing a 1-9 system for bloglines… it works for a while.
You know the problem, you can subscribe to someone who posts a REALLY good post in every 10 – perhaps with the other 9 being random stuff which gets in the way.
It IS very hard IMHO and perhaps even more in FF due to the dynamics of a lifestream/microblog.
I love ALL my friends in twitter, ff, bloglines, but i honestly don't always have time to check how their cat is doing after the operation and getting through that level of information – even when speedreading – can be VERY hard.
Wow, I need to update my lists. =)
[...] Gray "With FriendFeed Lists, I Start to Organize the Noise", and Mike Fruchter "My A,B,C’s of FriendFeed" are two great examples on how they manage their information flow. Robert Scoble even hand [...]
[...] Gray "With FriendFeed Lists, I Start to Organize the Noise", and Mike Fruchter "My A,B,C’s of FriendFeed" are two great examples on how they manage their information flow. Robert Scoble even hand [...]
[...] “With FriendFeed Lists, I Start to Organize the Noise“, and Mike Fruchter “My A,B,C’s of FriendFeed” are two great examples of how they manage their information flow. Robert Scoble even hand [...]
[...] people they are subscribed to into specific groups. This feature was extremely useful and a few people have written about their tactics for using them successfully. The common theme has been to ensure [...]