I was messing around with FriendFeed last night to see what all the fuss is about. Like Plaxo Pulse (review) and SocialThing (review), FriendFeed aggregates yours and your friends' activity from various social networks into one feed. Unlike SocialThing, FriendFeed also allows folks to comment on each others' news feed items (as does Plaxo Pulse).
One feature that really caught my eye was one of the "find friends" tools. Like virtually, every social network, FriendFeed allows you to provide your web based email credentials (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) to search for friends. There's nothing special here.
But there's also an option to provide your Facebook credentials and have FriendFeed locate your Facebook friends that are already on FriendFeed.
And here's where it gets interesting. Once you provide your Facebook credentials, ostensibly to locate your friends on FriendFeed, the service immediately prompts you to add the FriendFeed Facebook App. Once you have agreed to add the app, it redirects you back to FriendFeed where it shows you which of your Facebook friends you have been subscribed to on FriendFeed.
So just to recap: 1) You Join; 2) You search for Facebook Friends; 3) You get subscribed to your Facebook friends AND you add the FriendFeed Facebook app.
In three clicks, FriendFeed has your social graph, your registration info, and has gotten you to add their Facebook app, which promotes your FriendFeed activity via Facebook news feeds.
Fantastic.
As more companies begin to explore the Hub & Spoke model, I would expect to see these sites integrate the addition of Facebook and MySpace apps into their destination site's registration process.
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