I have been mucking around with some social media aggregation sites and my most recent venture is FriendFeed, which I’ve seen around the web and have known about it for a while, but never really got around to trying it. Well, I managed to get there, and here’s what I found.

What’s most striking about FriendFeed is the design, and perhaps this is why I might choose it above others (plus it supports the most sites). FriendFeed has no style. I don’t mean it is distasteful, but it has no style as in it has a header and then you just get a list on a white background. This is a refreshing design, catering to the puritan needs in us. I see this as an absolute positive aspect of the site, I very much enjoy the clean form, allowing me to concentrate on content instead.

Sites supported are also wide and varied, from obvious ones like Youtube and StumbleUpon to smaller sites like Furl and Tipjoy. There is also a lot of variation, for example Library Thing is supported, which is a social Book catalog and discovery tool, but you can also add music sites like Last.fm, and many others, totaling up to 41 great services.

Bloggers will love FriendFeed because it not only allows you to add your blog, but other blogs where you write. You can specify blogs with multiple authors and only show the stories you wrote. Since I do most of my writing on other sites this is a great way for me to showcase this, previously I could only achieve this with a complicated but of php.

You can also create rooms for specific topics, groups and so on, creating and sharing content only relevant to that room. This is awesome for bloggers too to promote the topic of their blog, but also study groups, friends, and so on.

Overall I like FriendFeed a lot. I haven’t made my decision on the best one, but FriendFeed is currently at number 1. Simplicity and number of features make this service one of the easiest ones to use and with the ways you can display it on your blog, possible the most productive too.

Being a blogger means some pretty different work methods than other types of work. Just think of GTD contexts for example. If you are a blogger you have @computer and @computer and @computer, if you specialize in some area, you might also have @computer. All in all, in some cases you will need special methods, or use available options differently. Here are 5 tips for Google Reader productivity geared especially toward bloggers.

Using tags

My primary use for Google Reader is to find stories. About 60% of my posts are about things I haven’t read before, out of the top of my head, the other 40% is about interesting stuff I read about. I write for 5 blogs at the moment and all of them require special types of content. One requires longer stories, the other requires shorter stories, one requires posts about web development and css and so on and so forth. Tags are a great way for me to indicate which blog the story could go to later. This enables me to go through all new items quickly and categorize them.

The great thing about tags is that you can also use them for personal interest. If I come across a story about the new Gibson guitar, I will want to read it later, I can just label it “personal” or something similar.

Sharing is networking

Sharing is a great way to stay in touch with your readers, let them know what kind of person you are and show people what kind of stuff you like. For example, Hack Your Day is all about productivity right? Well, apart from writing the blog I also play guitar and sing, I like guitars and so on, so the best way for me to communicate that is to share these kinds of stories. I can’t really blog about them on Hack Your Day, but if someone likes the blog enough to look into the author, they’ll see what other stuff I like, they may discover that they like similar things. Due to that they may refer other people to me, they may want to work with me and so on.

The new note options also enable you to share your opinion with you shared item. Since in your notes only the post title and your notes are shown, in theory you could also cover the item like a blog post. If you’re a popular blogger your readers will be interested in anything you have to say, so giving them as much as you can will make you even more popular.

Using stars

Many people I know use stars very unproductively. They star a load of items to read later, only read about 30% of them, and then keep many starred until the end of time. If you are a blogger, Google Reader is a professional tool you can use, so use it productively, give those stars some meaning.

If you don’t use the tagging system I described or if you only have one blog the best use of stars is to indicate articles you want to cover in the future. Once you’ve covered it, be sure to remove the star though so you can get an accurate reading of how many sources you have left.

However if you do use the tag system, there really is no point to using the stars like this, since the tags serve the same purpose. Once you’ve covered the story, just remove the tag. You can still use stars pretty well though for a multitude of things. I use them to indicate upcoming applications. There are quite a few apps which I love and are either in closed beta, or are still in production and I want to wait some more with a review. In these cases I add a star so I know I need to come back and check up on them later.

Reading by importance

Many people have hundreds of subscriptions and complain that they need to go through thousands of rss items daily. You’re a blogger, going through items does not make you money and is not at all a productive use of your time! I would more accurately describe it as a total waste. I just missed about 3 days and I went through about 150 items, which means 50 a day, which I don’t see growing all that much.

The secret to productive reading is categorization by importance. I have a local news page in my RSS feed which produces around 50 items a day. These however are not important so if I have read my important onces and I feel tired, there is no need to read these.

I suggest creating three folders, “daily”, “important”, and “other”. This is the combination that works best for me, let me show you how I use them. Daily items are ones that I read every day obviously. This would be Lifehacker for example, Freewaregenious and so on. If I find that more than 50% of a site’s post are worth covering (extremely rare), they get into the daily folder.

The important folder is for sites who produce some great stories, and I do read daily, but I don’t mind if I skip some stories. These sites typically produce 20% - 30% cover worth stories. This of course doesn’t mean the rest aren’t good, they just wouldn’t fit on any blogs I write to.

The other folder all the other feeds I like, but I don’t necessarily read all the time. These could be news feeds, blogs of friends, twitter feeds and so on. These are the feeds that are very fun to read, but produce no extra worth for my blog(s).

If you use this tip you will find that you use your time much more productively. I understand that its fun to read a lot of blogs, thoughts, ideas, news, but when you really get down to it, the good old 80-20 rule applies. 20% of the items contribute to 80% of your blog, while the other  80% hardly contribute anything.

Using trends to establish what to read

Google Reader has some built-in statistics which may seem like a “just for fun” option, but you can use it to your advantage. As I’ve said above, it’s important to spend time with the truly important feeds, and usig the data in the trends page is a great way to establish importance.

The best way to establish what you need to read is to initially use stars to indicate items you want to cover for any of your blogs. In the trends section, you can then take a look at the number of stars from each subscription, the more stars, the more important.

Update frequency could also indicate the importance of a blog since this raises the chance of you giving something a star. It also enables you to take a look at how many posts you create on your own blog on average. Hack Your Day has 0.8 posts daily right now, which tells me I need to write more, I would like to raise that to 1.5 at least.

There are other types of data you can take a look at. If you email yourself (or others) all the stories you want to cover the emailed data is quite handy. You can also take a look at the most inactive feeds and simply remove them.

You can also take a look at when you read feeds most, by time of day, day of the week and last 30 days, which can give you a good overview of time management. I read the most items on Tuesday, don’t ask me why, and indeed this shows me that I am not using my time right. I want to work on blogging roughly the same amount each day, so a very flat graph would be my ideal data set, showing that I spend the same time every day. This urges me to take a look at how and when I work, so I can optimize my time usage.

Sometimes a great feature hides in plain site from me. A great example is the trends link in Google Reader, which I have never checked out for some reason, but now that I did, I want to show you guys what it can do. Basically it’s a statistics factory for your RSS reading habits, which may seem useless or only fun to many people, it does give room for some productivity.

I actually only have about 20 feeds at a time, I tend to root out ones I don’t read often. Now that I looked at the trends, I discovered that there are feeds where I only read about 2% of the material published. Google reader shows you this info in a “top feeds” table where you can see the number of items published in a feed per day, and the percentage of items you actually read. This works really well, since if you have 200 items unread in a feed and simply click “mark all as unread” these won’t count in statistics-wise. o if you’re struggling with hundreds of feeds, why not slim them down a bit? If you read them for entertainment or for work, I think you can safely delete ones where you read only 1-5%.

Another great feature is on the left, where you can see starred, shared and emailed items, grouped by feed, so you can derive the most important feeds in your life, or ones with the most quality posts. For bloggers this could be especially useful, since I do cover stories from others once in a while, and seeing the most quality blogs is a real help.

I think that much productivity comes from merging two separate things you use into one. Using Outlook for managing email and tasks is more productive than using Outlook and Remember the Milk for example (not in all caes, but many).

One such example I found today is a way to get notified of news quickly in your instant messaging system. An online service, Feed Crier, will send you an instant message whenever a feed in your RSS list gets updated. This way you don’t need to check your Google Reader every ten minutes, or keep it open, you will be notified automatically.

Since most people use some IM client anyway, this is productive use of resources, even if you’re not that big on news. Personally, I’m not that big on IM, but following the news is much simpler this way, since you don’t even need to lift a finger.