On FriendFeed, I only follow people that I followed pre-FF. People like Fred Wilson, Andrew Chen and my good friend Chris Nguyen. Why? Simply because if I find a persons’ blog or site highly interesting I think following their broader web activity on FF will be interesting as well.
Lately, I’ve been using FF more and more to find interesting stuff from all around the web. Because of my heavier FF use I’m hunting for more trusted “brands” to follow to feed my habit.
I don’t like a lot of noise so I’ve kept my FF subscriptions to a smaller group of name “brands” that deliver a plenty of signal. You could say that I haven’t been very adventurous in adding subscriptions to my feed. I also don’t have much of an I’ll-add-you-if-you-add-me mindset, which has kept my subscriptions even slimmer.
This is where my #1 FriendFeed feature request kicks in helping me be more adventurous in my subscription adding. They already have the “Show best ofs” feature for your friends page so it shouldn’t be too difficult to add it to individual user pages as well.
Adding the “Show best ofs” feature to individual FF user pages would help me better decide to subscribe to FF users I stumble across organically on FF. For instance, like when I stumble across Sarah Austin:
Currently, I get plenty of Friend-of-Friend items in my feed and if an item is really interesting I’ll check out the Friend-of-Friends’ user page. This is where I run into a problem.
It’s hard to make judgement call on if a particular FF user will add interesting stuff to my feed if I subscribe to them by viewing current items on their first page. Since I find it cumbersome flipping through previous pages I usually don’t make it past a particular users’ current page. Kind of like not making it past the first page of search results on Google.
It would be so much better to get a snapshot of a FF users’ name brand by browsing their “Show best ofs” for the day, week, and month.
Not everyone has tons of people adding “Likes” or “Comments” to their FF items, like Louis Gray or Corvida, passing them virally around FF via the Friend-of-Friend feature and into your feed. Most people have smaller amounts of Likes or Comments on their items so they don’t get very far on FF.
This is another reason the “Show best ofs” feature on individual user pages would be handy. If a non-power user ever does get an item to my feed via the Friend-of-Friend feature it would be highly valuable to than quickly assess their FF name brand.
What do you think? Hopefully, Bret Taylor and gang are already planning to roll this feature out soon.
