A few months ago I talked about the growing community of SharePoint professionals and users who were joining the conversations at Twitter:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/fortheuser/archive/2008/04/21/meet-me-on-twitter.aspx

I still use Twitter quite a bit (in spite of its seemingly continual technical issues and outages), and it is still a great place to interact with other people out there who use SharePoint on a regular basis.  But I wanted to take a quick second to mention another social network that I think you should definitely check out if you're looking for new sources of SharePoint information, or just information in general: FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is an interestingly versatile tool.  It's a social network, RSS feed aggregator, instant messenger, and forum all rolled up in one.  I've configured my FriendFeed page to aggregate the output of my activities on this blog, Google Reader, Twitter, and many other websites, so that it's all available in one place if someone wants to see it.

But let's face it, I'm not that interesting, and I'm certainly not writing this post to ask you to pay attention to what songs I've bookmarked on Pandora or the latest article about the Indianapolis Colts that I've shared on Google Reader, and this isn't a blog about either of those two things either.  This is a blog about SharePoint, so let's talk about how it relates to what you can find on FriendFeed.

The social networking aspects of FriendFeed means that you can subscribe to the FriendFeeds of anyone else on the site, so you can now track and see what other people on the site are reading, commenting, and sharing about SharePoint.  And yes, once you sign up for the site, you can comment on any item anyone posts and mark the posts you "Like", providing more insight and metadata about the content than you could get from a standalone RSS reader like Google Reader.  And the comments are threaded, acting as a discussion forum about the article, which is nice because the discussion is centralized on FriendFeed rather than spread across several different sites.

The real hook for FriendFeed with regards to SharePoint is the Rooms feature. There are a couple of SharePoint-specific rooms that you can participate in and see content provided that is specific to SharePoint:

SharePoint Talk: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/sharepointtalk
SharePoint River: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/sharepointriver

SharePoint Talk is the place to go when you've found a great SharePoint article that you want to share with other people or if you want to start or engage in a discussion about a post already found in the room.  Anyone who wants to can join the room and share articles in it, we only ask that the content is relevant to SharePoint in some way.

SharePoint River is a source of SharePoint content from around the Internet, aggregated from several automated sources.  It's best used to see what kind of SharePoint-specific noise is going on throughout the Internet and to find articles or sources that you might not have otherwise come across.  I would warn that if you subscribe to that room that you probably don't want to have it put its articles on your FriendFeed home page, because it generates a lot of postings in a hurry and can be hard to follow.

Additionally, you can cross-post articles from your home page to your rooms, and vice versa, with ease.  So if your normal feeds find something of interest that you want to add to the SharePoint Talk room, you can easily do that from your FriendFeed home page.

There are some drawbacks to FriendFeed, the biggest one being that you'll only see the headlines for the articles in your feeds, it doesn't give you any previews.  So you'll have to work a little harder to find out what's actually in the article, but that can be a good thing too

All in all, I've really enjoyed the experience on FriendFeed, and much like Twitter, I encourage you to check it out if you're looking for new sources of SharePoint information and interaction. Feel free to subscribe to my feed if you want, although I'm going to warn you that it's not 100% SharePoint stuff and like I said, I'm not that interesting.

http://friendfeed.com/ferringer

p.s. FriendFeed has a much better performance track record so far than Twitter does, but I don't want to make a big deal out of that or turn this into a "Twitter is down" complaint, so that's all I'm going to say on the matter.