Come On Baby, Let’s Get A Room!

With the news that Friendfeed has introduced the capability for users to create public and private rooms, I’ve decided to start a new social media experiment by starting the Make Use Of public Friendfeed Room.

The thinking behind it is this. When a Make Use Of story is published, I will put a link to it in the Friendfeed room. Everyone can then drop by the room, comment on the stories, chat to one another and generally have a jolly good time.

Now you’re probably wondering how this differs from the Make Use Of comments board. Plus I’ve had a couple of people tell me this could make the comments boards on Make Use Of suffer and the world will come crashing down. Well the way I see it is this :

* Not everyone who visits Make Use Of has a Friendfeed account, likes Friendfeed and is inclined to visit Friendfeed, even if they were paid to. So those people will still use the comments boards here.

* People who hang out at Friendfeed and who haven’t heard of Make Use Of will get to hear of us over there, find Make Use Of and hopefully subscribe to our RSS feed. We don’t delude ourselves into thinking the whole world knows about us. We know we still have a lot of work to do to get the word out about Make Use Of and Friendfeed can definately help with that.

* I think the Friendfeed room will provide a faster, more interactive conversational experience. Due to spam issues (and that irritating time delay called “going to bed”), sometimes it can take several hours for comments to clear the moderation queue here and this can hold things up. But over at Friendfeed, comments are cleared immediately and so the conversation moves faster.

Obviously our priority is to drive traffic to the Make Use Of site so I am going to give the Friendfeed room a trial run of 3 months and see how it gets on. If it negatively impacts Make Use Of’s stats then we’ll abandon the Friendfeed room. But hey you never know, it may become a runaway success! You never know till you try right?

As well as commenting on Make Use Of stories, here are some other things you can do in the room :

* Leave comments, questions, suggestions and criticisms for the Make Use Of editors and writers (just click on “share something” and start writing in the message box). We will respond as soon as possible.

* Leave other weblinks for sites related to stories we have covered and discuss them. Invite the other members of the room to leave their opinions. For example, I did an article yesterday on Google Maps. Have you found something similar? Drop the link in the Friendfeed room and begin discussing it. Hopefully others will drop by and discuss it with you. This is good if you have a favourite site that you want to share. But obviously no spam please!

So if you have a Friendfeed account, just drop by the room and join! See you there!

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger, professional freelance writer and the editor of Make Use Of. Check out his personal blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

Filed Under: Annoucements
Tags: announcements, friendfeed, social media, social networks