Use FriendFeed to broaden your community

This post could be subtitled “Or: where the hell have you people been in the last 9 years?”

I’ve been blogging a long time and across several different domains, although always under my real name. I’ve built solid relationships with people through blogging and by virtue of being connected to a super-connected person. I have a blogfam, and it’s a beautiful thing.

What I’ve never really had, however, is an audience.

It isn’t as if I really cultivated an audience. I’m an indifferent, scattered blogger, happy to write about everything and nothing. I’m as happy writing a lengthy, well-researched opinion piece as I am letting a daily digest of Twitter status updates serve as a blog entry. Community has always been more important to me than numbers, and in many ways it still is. In the last year or so, my community has expanded slowly to include people like Melissa, Ayse, and Derrick, but prior to that it was always the same old (beloved) folks who swung by and checked in.

Friendfeed is changing all of that.

I participated in Twit-Out back in May as a result of ongoing frustration with Twitter’s increasingly unreliable service. Like a lot of other people, I headed over to Friendfeed to see what the fuss was all about. After only a few hours of use, I became a convert.

Conversations were springing up all over the place! I subscribed to the feeds generated by well-known bloggers and soon discovered that I was perfectly happy without them adding noise to my signal. Yet despite that small hiccup, in no time at all, I communicating with people who were friends-of-friends and acquaintances-of-acquaintances, and found that they were just as happy to “like” something I posted, and to add a quick comment if so inclined.

What is it about Friendfeed that lowers the barrier of entry into certain online communities? I’d like to think it’s Friendfeed’s ease of use, minimalist interface and uptime that makes people stick around. When friends of yours recomment posts by acquaintances you may not know, it as if they’re introducing you to this person at a social gathering, and in no time, you’ve managed to build a completely different audience than the one you’re used to.

This rarely if ever happened to me on Twitter, and I never had any success with Jaiku or Pownce, but on Friendfeed, it seems that most of us are committed to supporting this community we’ve started to build, and are all to happy to hip each other to cool people we might not otherwise encounter. I started out by subscribing to five close friends. In a month, that number has grown nearly tenfold. I’m learning about new people and reading different perspectives, and they’re meeting me in kind. This is the kind of social capital and exchange I can really support.

Are you using FriendFeed? If not, why not?