Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: Discover FriendFeed’s Hide Option

Many people refer to social media sites as an echo-chamber, full of noise, and tough to find signal. Some gravitate towards extreme amounts of interaction, with thousands of subscribers. Myself, I can’t quite digest that much chatter…

With so many things grabbing at my attention, I need to cut to the chase as quickly as possible, and maximize the amount of information I consume.

FriendFeed is a wonderful mechanism to do so. As I wrote in a previous article, the introduction of lists has been one of the best ways to help me organize all of the information coming in.

With my list of subscribed friends steadily going up, even lists can only help so much. To help with this, FriendFeed offers Hide options.

The Options

FriendFeed, by default, shows you friend-of-friends’ posts. The FriendFeed crew wants to help by exposing you to other friends to which your friends are subscribed. This is the quickest way to “listen in” on the many different conversations that are going on.

In this instance, I have several options:

• I can hide all entries from a specific feed of a specific “friend of” (in this case Twitter),
• all entries from a from a specific “friend of”,
• all “friend of” entries from my friend,
• or all entries from a specific feed medium (in this case Twitter).

The Reason I Use It

I have found a little hiccup, for me, in FriendFeed: I am subscribed to both Mashable and Alan Edgett, but each is in a different list – causing one or the other to usually appear in an unintended list. If I don’t suppress “friend of” entries, the water can get a little muddy at times.

I presently have the “friend of” feature turned off (as you can see above), in favor of monitoring responses to my friends posts. Since I am interested in my friends’ posts, and read almost all of the comments, I can find interesting friends very easily – willing to expand the conversation.

My thought process has been beneficial so far, and I am not bombarded with duplicate entries. This helps me find other friends and I usually can qualify whether I would enjoy their content based upon how they interact with the community.

The Block

The Hide options can be very powerful, so I try to use it sparingly. I believe in everyone’s right to say what they want, and if I am offended I can simply unsubscribe. However, the unsubscribe option does not prevent other comments from appearing in your friends’ threads.

FriendFeed has provisioned for this with an option to hide all entries from a specific user. This course of action is somewhat drastic, but I have had to use it – only once, thank goodness.

My Take

FriendFeed has offered a wonderful set of tools to both help you aggregate your various content feeds and by allowing commenting. Additionally, by giving me options to groom how I want to view the conversation, FriendFeed has created a very interesting community. The people on FriendFeed are witty, cynical, supportive, and friendly – showing you that even cyber-space the range of human emotion can be powerful when given room to roam.

While the Hide option is powerful, it is my suggestion that you play with it to see whether it can help you find what interests you.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.