If there’s one area of Friendfeed which I find most outsiders don’t know/understand it’s Friendfeed’s Rooms. To stress the value/importance of rooms,I’m happy to admit Rooms are where I spend most of my time on Friendfeed…mainly because you know what you’re going to get. Let me explain…
What is a Friendfeed Room?
A room at it’s most basic level is a mini-version of Friendfeed, a place where you can set the subject/theme and people can share content into that specific room.
Types of Friendfeed Rooms
You can create:
- Private Rooms (requires invites and are not indexed by search engines)
- Semi-Private Rooms (anyone can read or comment, only room admins can post)
- Public Rooms (anyone can access or join the room)
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Private Rooms
Private Rooms are a really useful option when it comes to collaboration or private content. We in fact use one here at TNW to discuss/share blogging topics, ideas and news. The uses for private rooms are endless…
- Team Discussions
- Private Bookmarking
- Private Chatroom
- Private Newstream
- Aggregating Content
- Ego Feed (a feed of everything that mentions your name or your company)
Semi-Private Rooms
Semi-private rooms are essentially very similar to blogs. Anyone can like/comment but only admins can post into the rooms. This is ideal for people/businesses who want a to share public content and receive feedback,works particularly well for blogging live events or news/press releases.
Public Rooms
Public Rooms are where “geeks” on particular topics/themes come into their own. As mentioned above, Public Rooms allow for anyone to join, share, like and comment and is by far the most social of the three room types.
Some interesting public rooms are:
Tips to Setting Up a Room
- Find a topic you are deeply passionate about.
- Ensure there isn’t a room already set up like it
- Create a decent logo, Room Name and Description
- Set up some guidelines/rules
- Make a list of people to invite who you know will be interested in your room topic
- Get posting! And if you’re aiming to make your new room a mini community within Friendfeed – only manually post don’t put RSS feeds in there!
Finding/Creating Rooms
To create a room, ensure you are signed up with Friendfeed and Create a New Room.
Finding rooms has never been easier since Friendfeed launched the Friendfeed Rooms Search & Directory. It’ll give you an overview of some of the most popular rooms on Friendfeed and also let you search by topic/subject.
FFHolic.com is a separate site which stores a bunch of interesting statistics, such as most popular rooms and most active rooms – definitely worth checking out.
For more information about Friendfeed Rooms, make sure you check out Friendfeed Help’s Rooms section.
**UPDATE**
Robert Scoble just started a great discussion on the reasons why rooms are so useful. You can read the discussion below or live on Friendfeed.
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