I am a big fan of twhirl, a desktop client that up until last week allowed one to update their Twitter account(s) and receive Twitter updates from friends. Then last week, twhirl introduced support for friendfeed in their newest version, 0.8. This came as a very pleasant surprise since I had been struggling with using friendfeed. I did not have an app that would keep me abreast of my friends’ online activities, so friendfeed was rather useless. Maybe I should back up a minute though. Not familiar with friendfeed? You mean to tell me that you are not using friendfeed yet after all the buzz it received out of SXSW? ;)

A Friendfeed Primer

Friendfeed is an aggregator and broadcaster of one’s online activities. It’s very simple to create your account, but could get rather difficult to keep up with if you are not careful. To set up your account, all you have to do is indicate to Friendfeed the account usernames for other social media sites that you want to share with your friends, such as Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Last.fm, Tumblr, Netflix, and YouTube (there are about 40 services total). Friendfeed does not need passwords of these accounts, fyi. And by the way, you can also share with Friendfeed posts from your blog(s) regardless of the blogging platform.

Once you’ve finished setting up your account, your every move will be shared with your friends and people that subscribe to your friendfeed. You see friendfeed is like the Facebook News feed, but on steroids. You don’t have to be “friends” with someone to follow their activities. The more people you follow on Friendfeed, the more likely you won’t ever see your friends offline. The key is to manage your friendfeed subscriptions carefully. Like Facebook, I only plan on using friendfeed to follow my true friends, and twhirl is the best way to see what they are sharing.

I believe twhirl is so popular because the design is very similar to the AIM client and other 1.0 instant messaging apps. This creates an instant level of comfortability. Every time an activity occurs, you can receive a pop-up alert in the bottom right of your monitor. You can also set how long that alert should be visible. You can set the opacity, text font, notification method, refresh rate, and how the app should behave when minimized. You can also directly comment on other friend’s posts right within twhirl (very cool). One of the best features of twhirl is you can manage multiple friendfeed and twitter accounts. I realize this is probably only useful for the “super user”, but it should become more of a benefit now that twhirl has expanded with friendfeed.

I’ve tried following my friends’ activities in other ways, primarily through email subscriptions. I get email updates from Picasa or bookmarks from others via del.icio.us, but they never grab my attention soon enough. Eventually I would check them out. Twhirl does help me take notice of my friends’ activities because of its AIM-like features.

Actions speak louder than words, which sums up why I like friendfeed. I am a Twitter user too, but so many tweets that I receive are useless and nonsense. Friendfeed, on the other hand, shows me what my friends are truly interested in. Less fluff and all substance.

So, as my title reads … use with caution, but definitely use. If you do, feel free to follow me on friendfeed at http://friendfeed.com/vtwick. Just don’t expect me to follow back if I don’t know you.