Powersurf Through Friendfeed With StumbleRead

With Friendfeed growing more and more in popularity, never a week goes by without another new application popping up claiming to make your Friendfeed experience an easier one. The latest one doing the rounds is StumbleRead which allows you to “stumble” through the latest stories on Friendfeed very fast so you can rapidly leave lots of comments and “likes”.

This is actually proving to be one of the better Friendfeed tools for me but one of its major drawbacks is that there is no integration into the actual Friendfeed interface. You have to do everything through the StumbleRead website which means one more Firefox tab open. If someone makes a Greasemonkey script that allows users to open StumbleRead in a Friendfeed tab then that would be peachy, but right now I think it would be a hard sell getting hardcore Friendfeeders to come over to the StumbleRead website - and then stay there.

Basically how StumbleRead works is like this. On the left are the stories going through Friendfeed (which is updated every 180 seconds). As you scroll through the stories on the left (using the J and K keyboard keys), StumbleRead analyzes the links in each post and then opens that link in the right hand pane so you can immediately see what the Friendfeed user is talking about. This enables you to see if you “like” it or not and you can decide on the spot if you want to make a comment or not. If you like it, hit the L keyboard key. To make a comment, hit the C keyboard key. If you want to move on, use the J and K key.

By hitting the C keyboard key, the comment box pops up :

Another keyboard shortcut is S for share. This posts your own messages and links on Friendfeed.

All in all, pretty good. Using this site I have found my commenting on Friendfeed has gone up a great deal and my visibility on the site has increased as a result. So if you’re looking to increase your social networking profile, this site might be worth trying out for a while. It allows you to whizz through a ton of sites at lightning fast speed, make intelligent comments about them and gain valuable social contacts in the process.

[rating=3]

(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