FriendFeed IM – Nice Alternative to Dedicated Desktop Applications

Yesterday the FriendFeed team announced integration with instant messaging services that allows users to send updates to FriendFeed right from the IM dialogue and also see and reply to new comments on their posts and be updated when new items are posted by friends. At this stage the FriendFeed IM only works with Google Talk or other Jabber-based IMs but knowing how busy FriendFeed team usually is I’d expect other IM protocols to be added in the near future.

What I particularly like is that FriendFeed allows you to choose exactly how busy you want the chat window to become because of the notification settings available. For example, you can choose to only get notified when someone comments on one of your posts or you can choose a larger number of updates to be notified when any of your feeds gets updated (the home feed or the one formed by a certain list of friends). The functionality also lets you send comments to other people’s posts using the numbers FriendFeed assigns to every item delivered to you via an IM. Also a good part is that you can actually suspend updates sent to your IM account if you are trying to focus on something that does not involve checking FriendFeed constantly to later resume the flow of posts again when you are available.

All in all, the integration works pretty much how you would expect - simple and efficiently. It also ensures a reasonable level of security with a verification procedure to prove you own the account. To my surprise, integration worked perfect even on my Miranda multi-protocol IM client which is well known to be quite choosy when it comes to talking to bots.

The disadvantages include absence of notifications for likes you get on your items (which means that to see these things you’ll have to visit the website itself) and the limitation in the length of posts to several hundred characters and adding a link to go to the message itself to see it in full if it’s longer.

I expect that people will start using friends lists on FriendFeed much heavier now that IM integration is introduced as some users will hardly want to get all the updates via IM from all the people they subscribe to (and FriendFeed can easily get way too noisy if you follow more than a hundred of people). I am quite sure the majority of heavy users will choose to only receive IM updates from the people that are actually important enough to be delivered in real time. These people can be easily added to a new list created specifically for this and you will be notified immediately whenever someone important for you posts anything.

Also it is quite possible that mobile use of FriendFeed will increase as well as Josh Lowensohn suggests - especially for users with generous enough text messaging plans.

Most probably people using dedicated desktop clients for FriendFeed (like Twhirl that I personally use) will hardly need the IM functionality - only maybe to be notified of new comments on the posts a user submits not to check the feed in the client. But if you check the Twhirl window for FriendFeed often enough, you will quickly see all the changes without the IM chat window notifying you of new activity constantly. But I believe there are many people who do not want to install some special desktop application to track FriendFeed activity but will gladly adopt a desktop-based interaction using the tool that they already use anyway. So all in all, this definitely looks like a smart move.