VirtualPresence: FriendFeed - Rooms

Whoah, looks like I took my sweet time to follow up on my VirtualPresence posts. It's been a few weeks even. But I'm going to make it up by talking a bit about a cool and useful feature of FriendFeed called rooms.

Rooms in FriendFeed are a bit like a forum section dedicated to a certain topic. People can join rooms and post, comment and like items that are shared in this room. Basically, in FriendFeed, you can follow people, if you are interested in the person, and you can follow a room, if you are interested in a certain topic. And don't forget that you can put rooms in a group as well if you don't want to see them in your home feed all the time. Have a look at the Cthulhu room for instance, which I created to share stuff on the Cthulhu Mythos that I find online. 

What about my band?

There are several options on how you can use FriendFeed rooms to your advantage. You could create a room each time you release a new album. The room is the perfect place to gather reviews, share artwork, post music vids of songs, etc. If you have a decent following of fans, you probably won't even have to do much yourself, as they will be doing a lot of the sharing. Post some exclusive info in there first from time to time and you get a total win-win situation.

Another good use of a FriendFeed room would be for live performances (either a separate room for each tour, or just a single room for all gigs). You can post "on the road" photo's here. And it would be an excellent place to invite your fans to share photo's or live vids they made of you playing. 

Do you have a question about using webapps for your band? Drop me an email, and I might answer it on the blog.

VirtualPresence: FriendFeed - Basics

At first, I was planning on gently describing some of the building blocks of the social web, like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and so on. This would then lead into some of the more tricky stuff like FriendFeed. However, as my posting is somewhat irregular, I have decided to immediately go to some of the more fun stuff. If you think I'm going too fast, let me know and I will fill in some of those intermediate steps (and who knows, I might get to them later on anyway...).

So, on to FriendFeed!

FriendFeed is social aggregation web app, which is just a fancy way of saying that they collect what you share on other websites and present this as a single stream of information. You just make an account, add the sites that you use regularly and FriendFeed will capture what you do on those. Posted a Twitter message, favorited a YouTube movie, loved a song on last.fm, these are just some examples of what FriendFeed pulls in. Overall, they now support 48 services. You can also directly share links through FriendFeed.

Next to adding sites you use, you can also "follow" other FriendFeed users. Similar to following someone in Twitter, you will see whatever they shared (on sites they registered) appear in your FriendFeed account. As you can imagine, following a lot of people could become tricky through all different stuff that enters your account. To make this somewhat more manageable, you are able to add people you follow to different lists. I made separate lists to follow tech people, for instance.

You can find me on FriendFeed as well, of course. I share all kinds of stuff over there, not just metal-related items.

What about my band?

FriendFeed can be a good way to augment your online presence for fans that really want to follow what you are about. It makes it easy for people to follow what you do without them having to create accounts on all the same sites. Suppose that you posted a bunch of pictures of your last gigs on Flickr, FriendFeed will pick them up and fans that never go to Flickr will still be able to see them. 

Following other people is also somewhat easier through the different lists you can put them in. You can make a "Fans" list (where you could follow what your fans are sharing), a "Bands" list (where you can follow other bands with FriendFeed accounts), and so on.

Here, I have scratched the surface of FriendFeed because it will get even more interesting once we get to the supporting features and FriendFeed rooms.

Do you have a question about using webapps for your band? Drop me an email, and I might answer it on the blog.