Making FriendFeed useful for Twitterheads

FriendFeed is cool, because it lets you have conversations about status updates, links, photos, and other objects posted on many services, such as delicious, flickr, last.fm and more. FriendFeed doesn’t have the “Facebook black hole” problem — content sent into Facebook becomes unfindable, since updates and conversations are visible only to the friends of commenters — because Friendfeed makes content is public by default, and you can “follow” without friending.

But there’s a big drawback for people who are avid Twitter users. Many Twitterites feed their Tweets into FriendFeed. The comment threads following Twitter posts are cool, but the cost is cluttering FriendFeed with a huge stream of redundant Twitter posts.

Here’s how to solve the problem: Create two saved searches in FriendFeed. First, create a search that is everything BUT Twitter. This is what I type into the search box: -service:twitter friends:aslevin Then save the search. Once you do a search, FriendFeed gives you a link to “save this search.” Second, create a saved search for only Twitter updates with comments. This is what I type into the search box: service:twitter comments:1

Voila! Now, you can see the non-redundant Friendfeed stream aggregating posts from other services. And you can see only the Twitter posts that have generated comment threads on FriendFeed.

This is making my FriendFeed experience more useful already. Once Seesmic and Tweetdeck add support for FriendFeed, you can have the searches running in standing desktop columns, too.

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