The list: an age old way to manage. The list can tell whether you are part of the in-crowd or have to stand in line with the regular people, or it can help you tell what task or project requires your attention for the day. In social media circles, it can be both.

There is most certainly a plethora of social media offerings. With all of the popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, people are seeking ways to connect to other individuals or groups that share common interests. After all, The Web makes the world a lot smaller.

The problem with the abundance of all of these proverbial silos of social cliques is the extra effort to keep up with all of them. The burden of maintenance is enormous, and soon takes much of the fun and usefulness out of the equation.

A popular life-streaming site, FriendFeed, allows you to connect the dots. FriendFeed can be thought of as a way to socialize on just about any subject under the sun, and has become a publishing portal for all of your varied content - from a blog to Netflix choices, from Twitter to Flickr photo sharing.

While FriendFeed can be a lot of fun, such a site must serve a practical purpose as well. With the advent and popularization of RSS feeds and blogs, content is being created more rapidly than ever. However, trying to find useful information within the open fire hydrant of this content can be daunting.

FriendFeed, in a nutshell

FriendFeed recently launched their new version to include a group capability called lists. Basically, you can subscribe to 2 different types of content:

1. Friends: These are individual feeds of a person (or entity). A friend might aggregate many different types of content into their feed.
2. Rooms: Much like a newsgroup, Rooms are typically moderated and provide an area to post content around a particular subject (like election 2008 coverage, SharePoint, etc.).

Like channels on a television, lists enable you to program the types of feeds to which you watch, and a simple way to filter information into manageable chunks to increase the likelihood you will find useful information.

How I use lists:

I have created several different lists to help me find useful information or information that is enjoyable for me to consume. Here’s a breakout of where I am seeing some productive use:

• Home Feed: Everyone I subscribe to is part of my Home Feed. This is much like ground zero for me when I want to see unfiltered traffic of those to which I subscribe.
• A-Listers: This list obviously contains some of the notables on FriendFeed like Louis Gray, Mona N., and Scobleizer. However, I also use this list to monitor conversations from friends that quite often have a lot of conversations.
• Business: These are people I currently work with in some capacity or interact with in my local business community that happen to frequent FriendFeed. Sadly, there are only a few.
• Front Page: This is the list I will hit first if I am limited on time. I move those I am most interested in, I interact with most, or who interact with me most to this list. This list is comprised of both friends and rooms.
• SharePoint: I have created a list just to monitor activity on SharePoint as this is a very interesting subject to me presently. This list is solely comprised of rooms.
• Watched: This is a temporary list I use to watch content until I can determine how to classify it. This helps me ensure I spend time focusing on subscribers that may not post a lot or might post material I find questionable.

The Black-Hole List:

One way many individuals judge success in social media circles is simply by the number of subscribers. One use of lists, if you are devious, is to encourage someone to subscribe to you and tuck them away in a list you never frequent. While it may be tempting to some, many I spoke with seemed indignant at the thought of anyone using a black-hole list. I, myself, found it more ethical to simply unsubscribe if I was uninterested in the publisher’s content.

The Take-Away:

I have been spending a great deal more time on FriendFeed, since I discovered lists. In fact, this simple feature supplanted both Twitter and Plurk, in my opinion.

While I enjoy the conversations quite a bit, I am still seeking a balance between time spent and useful information I am gathering. More than not, I find that I will subscribe directly to a publisher’s blog content, and have been using FriendFeed more to interact with the publishers.

This use has given me a greater sense of true conversation as opposed to random comments left on a blog that may or may not be answered. Overall, FriendFeed has offered me a wonderful mechanism by which I can aggregate much of my different online content-types, and keep an index of information to which I might later refer.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

Tags: FriendFeed, life-stream, meta-aggregation, Social Media