FriendFeed: Part RSS News Reader, Part Social Networking

What do you get when you take one part RSS News Reader and one part Social Network? The minds behind FriendFeed decided to find out.

FriendFeed allows people to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that you wish to share. After creating an account, you can select from a large number of sharing options ranging from your activity on Digg, to your pictures on Flickr, to bookmarks stored on del.icio.us. All in all, there are on the order of 35 services that you can pull data from to be placed onto your FriendFeed. Once items have been shared, it then becomes pretty easy to have discussions around those shared items.

Your friends can then access your feed from the FriendFeed website, or they can use their favorite RSS feed reader. If you are already a Facebook user, you can add a Facebook application to connect your Facebook profile to all the other products you use around the web. You can also view FriendFeed in your iGoogle homepage.

While FriendFeed's functionality can somewhat be reproduced through the use of an RSS reader, pulling in the feeds of all your friends, this service manages to simply the complexity of doing so. FriendFeed is not going to take over the world, but it does have some useful features that will appeal to some users. We'll keep an eye on FriendFeed, but don't expect this service to be the next big thing.

If you want to kick the FriendFeed tires, you are welcome to subscribe to Stiffarm's FriendFeed.