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It was more than a week ago, but I’ve finally taken action after receiving the following email from my sister. While she’s not entirely social media illiterate, she even briefly joined Twitter before deciding it wasn’t for her, I was still shocked that she came up with this concept, considering she doesn’t spend all day up to her ears in it like Nate and I.

You know about this stuff – how come there is no company to link all these social networking sites together?  I have accounts on WAYN, myspace, friendster, facebook and hi5…wouldn’t it make sense if there was one parent company that linked all of these together so I could log in to one place and see everything?  and so that my friends on facebook could see my stuff on myspace, etc?  Why doesn’t this exist?

No kidding, sister.

After recovering from the fact that she is apparently on not one but two sites that I have never even heard of before (I have no idea how that happened), I decided it was time for me to check out FriendFeed. I told her that was the closest, right now, that she was likely going to come to finding what she was looking for there, but that it would likely disappoint her based on what I’d heard.

This isn’t going to be an extensive review with screen shots, mainly because I do not know how Nate finds the time to accomplish such things!

But for brevity’s sake, and because I only have been looking at the site for a short while, and because I am definitely coming down with something, here’s two things I like, and two things I dislike about FriendFeed:

Like: The Rooms. You can set up a private area for chats and info with only a specific group of people. This is one of the things I wish Twitter offered. Like, last night during the Celtics game it was great to read all those Tweets, but if I weren’t a Celtics fan (or a brand new bandwagon jumping Celtics fan, anyway), I probably would have avoided Twitter altogether last night. Those folks needed to get a room!

Dislike: Like my mom used to say every time she entered my bedroom growing up: What the hell IS all this junk? Friendfeed is kind of a cluttered mess, because you’ve got stuff coming at you from all driections, and people use Twitter…a lot. So all their Tweets take up most of the feed and you have to squint to find the non-Twitter stuff and by that point it’s like trying to find that one pair of jeans you really like buried under 15  piles of dirty socks and your field hockey uniform. I kind of understand what my mom was getting at all those years.

Like: Hallelujah, I was able to auto-subscribe to all my Facebook friends who are currently using FriendFeed. Brightkite had a similar feature, and I do hope that every social networking site that comes out from here on out follows suit.

Dislike: This might be less a Friendfeed problem than a Facebook one, but the accompanying Facebook app really has screwed my profile timeline. Basically, I already import my Tweets and other activity into Facebook, and by importing my Friendfeed activity, it’s like I’m doing everything twice. Probably will have to rejigger and disable something.

Verdict: Undecided. I haven’t spent enough time with it. Maybe I’ll do another review in a week and give you the verdict, but in the meantime, I feel like my mom surveying my clothing-strewn bedroom. What IS all this junk?

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