Build an Annotated IM Feed Reader with Friendfeed

In my day dreams at least, one of these days I am going to write a O'Reilly book called Friendfeed Hacks. As they keep adding features, I keep finding new uses for the service beyond the obvious.

I have explained in the past on how to maximize the imaginary friend feature and how to turn it into a real time ticker. Now here's a quick tutorial on how to turn Friendfeed into a cool instant messaging-based feed reader. This uses a new feature they turned on late last year.

First set up one or more imaginary friends that either include RSS feeds and/or Twitter streams. You can find a nice list of media sources available on Twitter here.

Next, roll these imaginary friends into a list.

Then, log into your Friendfeed account and activate IM updates for that list in your settings.

Now whenever there are new feed items or Tweets that hit your list, you will get a ping in your IM client. What's great about this (other than real-time distractions woo hoo!) is that you can take notes on your feeds by leaving comments over IM! All of your feed items and notes are stored on Friendfeed where they can be searched. However, if you use Google Talk in Gmail, they're accessible under Chats as well.

In my case, I pull a mashed-up feed of my Faves that I created with Google Reader and into a Friendfeed list called Feeds. Very handy! Plus, I can always turn it off with a the pause command if I need a break.