FriendFeed, allows people to aggregate their activities across the social web. It is a great place to find what sorts of things people are talking about. In some ways, FriendFeed is better for “real-time” web searches than Twitter because a FriendFeed search will not only return Twitter posts, but also shared RSS feeds, Facebook status updates, items posted natively in FriendFeed itself, stories being promoted on social news web sites like Digg.com, and much more. However, unlike Twitter, FriendFeed’s user population is smaller and tends to consist of people who are more technology-focused, so the results will be somewhat skewed in that direction.Although useful, searching FriendFeed today still leaves a lot to be desired. That’s where FriendDeck can help. After authenticating with your FriendFeed username and remote key, you can kick off searches from the box at the top of the FriendDeck window. Each search term will then display in its own column within FriendDeck. The end result is a web app that very much resembles the TweetDeck’s desktop application, which also lets you display search terms in columns. However, unlike FriendDeck, TweetDeck additionally lets you organize your Twitter friends into groups in order to follow and track different sets of users along with your search queries.
FriendDeck is a web-based interface for searching the social web aggregation service, FriendFeed. It can also be downloaded and used as an Adobe AIR desktop application. FriendDeck isn’t based on TweetDeck. However, you can also search Twitter from inside FriendDeck. Use the command twitter:search term
FriendDeck displays search results in columns, allowing you to track multiple search terms within the same window. As the individual items appear, you have the option of clicking “like” or commenting online on the postings.
What FriendDeck Won’t Do
Unfortunately, FriendDeck only allows monitoring of searches, not groups. Perhaps because FriendFeed already includes a “lists” feature, FriendDeck’s creator didn’t include the ability to simultaneously track different groups of people. That’s disappointing, since tracking lists (groups) on FriendFeed means having to constantly switch between them to see the latest news from each group. I would like an application that tracks lists, rooms, and search terms.
What FriendDeck Can Do
That said, there are still a couple of tricks you can do with FriendDeck in order to see more than just traditional searches. You can also:
- See a user’s likes – type in the query likes:{username}
- See a user’s comments – type in the query comments:{username}
- See a user’s friends – type in the query friends:{username}
- A list of posts relating to a URL – type in the query url:{url.com}
- A list of posts about a domain – type in the query domain:{domain}
Although those custom queries are certainly handy, I would like to see FriendDeck do more.