Finding Interesting FriendFeed Users

FFholic provides search functions that can be used to find the most interesting folks to subscribe to at FriendFeed:

Type in your favorite user in the search box in the top right
Click the radio button for Users
Click search
On the search results page click on Has xxx estimated subscribers

After a short wait the search results show you the FriendFeed users following the person you searched on ranked by those who have the most subscribers. Using this search you only need to have one favorite person to find the FriendFeed users who also find your favorite person interesting.

Here are some searches to give you the idea:

See who subscribes to GrowMap at FriendFeed.
Robert Scoble is number one at FriendFeed; who are the most active subscribers to Scobleizer?
Finding FF users by subject is not easy. Ernie Yacub suggested Michael Linton for his expertise on community currencies and open money systems. I doubt I’d ever have found that myself.
Sean McBride shares his expertise on the Middle East. See Sean McBride’s subscribers.
Some assist us in their choice of handles: bankwatch specializes in banking.

If you can find one active FriendFeed user who posts about your favorite interests you’ll be able to find more through them. The down side is we don’t know whether their followers actually SHARE anything on that subject; only that they also are interested in it.

I’m hoping if we keep suggesting it that one day we will be able to search FriendFeed by interest to find both the most popular items shared and conversations had AND subject matter experts by expertise!

That would greatly benefit all their users, create quality pages to bring in search traffic, and allow small businesses to offer their products and services directly to those who are truly interested in what they do.

It is still fast and simple to locate popular sites by subject in any search engine or on the StumbleUpon site. Simply search for +stumbleupon and +your interest. For example: Golf or Tennis or Ubuntu or Horses.

StumbleUpon really erred when they changed how they displayed sites by tag though. In the “old days” you landed on a page where you could read excerpts of the reviews, see how many other users liked them, and could easily identify which StumbleUpon users were experts in any subject.

Those pages were the most useful on StumbleUpon – and the ones advertisers would have gladly paid good money to advertise on because they absolutely would have converted. Apparently the new owners didn’t recognize what they had and eliminated them instead of monetizing them.

Whichever Social Networking Service decides to add the ability to quickly and easily find content and users by interest will become THE most popular Social Media service with both users and advertisers. I would love to provide beta testing and input for that service, spreading the word and recommending them to advertisers and users alike.

Gail Gardner

Small Business Marketing Strategist at GrowMap

Gail Gardner is the founder of GrowMap.com. She is a Small Business Marketing Strategist who mentors small businesses, bloggers, and freelancers. After 23 years in the field with IBM and 5.5 years managing AdWords accounts, her focus shifted to small business marketing strategy. GrowMap.com is listed by Cision as a Top 100 Site for Marketers and has received three Small Business Influencer Awards from Small Business Trends. Named by D&B a Top 50 SMB Influencer on Twitter, you can follow Gail @GrowMap and on LinkedIn.

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Comments

Venapro says

May 12, 2010 at 3:26 am

Wow. what a great trick to find Interesting FriendFeed Users.
Nice one. I will try it.Thanks

Jordan says

March 20, 2010 at 2:33 pm

This offers some great features that I was looking for. Good find!
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Devon says

December 25, 2009 at 1:50 am

I’m very interested in finding people on FriendFeed. I think your advice is wonderful and it has helped me.

vijy says

November 22, 2009 at 7:11 am

FFholic is a nice utility site built over friendfeed service.

Sandeep says

October 23, 2009 at 7:39 am

These are great tips for social networking.I’m going to use FFHOLIC utility in friendfeed.

vijay says

September 18, 2009 at 8:32 am

ffholic is awesome utility for friendfeed.

Mike says

September 13, 2009 at 1:51 pm

Thanks for the great tips for social networking.
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Jeremy says

August 9, 2009 at 11:59 am

I’ve never used friend feed before, but it looks pretty interesting. I might give it a shot.

InternetStrategist says

March 25, 2009 at 5:35 pm

@Chris Thank you. We hope you’ll be back.

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Chris Kindle says

February 16, 2009 at 4:17 am

Just came across your blog on Google. Interesting post, you bring up a few good things to think about. Good luck with the blog.

growmap says

January 27, 2009 at 5:52 pm

@Dennis You mean StumbleUpon? I have and I’m sure others probably have tried too. They did not answer any of the support requests I sent via various means when I was unable to open accounts there. I finally had someone else open one for me, but if I can’t get their captcha system to work others are likely to be having that issue too.

Getting someone’s ear from the outside is often a major challenge. You’d think they’d be seeking out and communicating with their most active users, promoters, and bloggers. Companies benefitting from free promotional work pretty much ignore those offering the best ideas most of the time.

Perhaps they don’t know they’re good ideas OR they feel threatened by outsiders making suggestions. If they ever tell me I’ll share it with you.

Dennis Edell says

January 26, 2009 at 9:25 am

Has anyone actually told them they may have screwed up?

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Internet Strategist says

January 26, 2009 at 12:05 am

@Dennis I loved the old StumbleUpon (SU); they were just heading in the right direction when they changed hands and the new owner got rid of the quality content pages by subject that allowed you to see excerpts of the most popular shared items, click through to the comments on each, see how many thumbed them up or down and easily find the SU user who shared items on each subject most often. That is where some Social Networking site truly needs to go.

@Rose I hope you saw the FriendFeed lists on the posts linked from this one. There are links so that you can visit each recommended person directly plus notes on many of them about why each person is being recommended. Once you find a few interesting people there you can easily find others because of the way the friend of a friend feature works there.

Both of your or anyone else is welcome to contact me there or at Twitter any time and I’ll help you get up to speed. There are some great discussions going on there all the time.

Internet Strategist’s last blog post..Finding Interesting FriendFeed Users

Rose says

January 24, 2009 at 7:08 pm

I just started using FriendFeed and am still finding my way around. I didn’t think of finding my friends–I was concentrating on adding friends. The former is more logical so I’ll go for it. Thank you for the tip.

Dennis Edell says

January 24, 2009 at 11:00 am

I haven’t even looked at FF yet, but it’s on my list. As a general rule though, I totally agree with interests over (or at least along side) users.

Dennis Edell’s last blog post..FINAL CALL: $100 Blog Review Contest Ends The 31st!