I get great utility out of what I’m doing. I see patterns before most other people do and those patterns are getting more and more useful. A year ago I didn’t have the ability to search Tweets or friendfeed items. Today I have very rich search features so I can go through my like feed, for instance, and find every item that mentions Evernote.

Think that’s not important? Well, Feedly, a company that makes a small toolbar that sits at the bottom of Firefox, is using friendfeed’s search API to find people who’ve said stuff about the pages you’ve visited. This is a new kind of application that simply was not possible a year ago.

via scobleizer.com

I’ve already sent out the FriendFeed search example to my friends on Twitter, and can only recommend that you begin using that style query for your own purposes. Just substitute Scoble’s username in the “like:…” operator with that of anyone that’s important to you/you trust in your niche market/specialization (journalists, scientists, techies, etc.) to get a great filtering mechanism.

Also, due to this post I finally decided to test out feedly.com, which is basically an advanced feed reader that runs locally in your browser as opposed to say Google Reader. It takes a minute to install in Firefox (FF 3.0+ required), and it still has a few flaws as to the intuitiveness of set-up and interface (some very common actions like adding/managing feeds were not immediately obvious).

Where the real power comes in is in the “Feedly Mini” toolbar that Robert mentions (once again it was a little labyrinthine to find the setting to turn it on, it should be on by default): It will show you FriendFeed / Twitter activity about every page you visit, and makes tweeting a page right from where you are a cinch.

It can also show the context of you having clicked through from one of your Twitter friends’ tweets as a small overlay of that tweet in the bottom-right corner, so that, if you liked the page/post you were sent to, you can RT from there as well. Unfortunately there seems to be a small bug still going on with Feedly dropping that overlay once you’re clicking around on the current page.

I see a lot of potential here, especially if they manage to iron out a few more kinks, and get their interface simplified a bit more.

Posted via web from AlexSchleber’s posterous