I have to admit that I've not been a particularly enthusuastic user of FriendFeed. I suspect that's because I hadn't reached a critical mass of Twitter and FaceBook followers/friends. But recently, I've had a steady stream of new FriendFeed subscribers so I've decided to look into a little further.

FriendFeed simply describes itself as "a service that makes it easy to share with friends online". I prefer to think of it as an online presence aggregator. It takes my blog posts, Twitter feed, Flickr photos, YouTube videos and a bunch of other services and creates a one stop shop so that folks interested in what I say and do (in the online world) can find it all in one place.

This makes a lot of sense. Rather than subscribing to RSS and creating accounts on a bunch of other sites, FriendFeed pulls everything together. From a "publisher's" point of view, you don't do anything differently. Just keep posting and tweeting using whatever services you want and your subscribers on FriendFeed will see your updates.

Many people argue that today's online services may not be there in a year's time and that any time they've invested into publishing or sharing their content will be lost. Providing FriendFeed survives (and I can't see where they're making money yet) then it becomes the point of aggregation.

Thus far, my own use of FriendFeed has been limited but from today, I'm going to spend more time there. I've linked up my other online presences to FriendFeed so that my updates make their way to that feed and I've added the FriendFeed special bookmarklet that makes it easy to share stuff to FriendFeed.The main problem is that FriendFeed can get very busy very fast and there can be lots of duplicated content (see this article for more on this topic).