If you use the Internet for business, you have no doubt come across numerous social networking sites. There are a mind numbing number of these sites, all of which help you share what you are doing with the world, and to establish relationships with others who share common interests. Examples of these social networking sites include:
- YouTube
- StumbleUpon
- del.icio.us
- digg
- flickr
- yelp
- Mixx
These social networking sites can be useful if you want to learn what industry leaders are doing and thinking. I frequently learn about new tools, websites and tactics from some of the people I follow.
The problem, of course, is time. How do you follow a couple dozen thought leaders on multiple networking sites? One elegant solution is called FriendFeed. FriendFeed is basically a social networking site aggregator. Once you sign up as a user, you enter all of your social networking feeds into a simple form, then save. Next, you allow FriendFeed access to your email account to search for other FriendFeed users.
You can then “subscribe” to other FriendFeed users and other users can “subscribe” to you. Every day thereafter, FriendFeed will send you an email digest of posts and activity by those in your subscription list. This email digest is a fast and convenient way to keep up with any social networking activity by those on your list, all in one place.
Obviously the big drawback is that you can only subscribe to your target if that person has a FriendFeed account. Still, for those who do participate in this service, it is a breeze to quickly track what they are up to.
If you are interested and want to subscribe to me, the link is http://friendfeed.com/jginsberg.
