I've been meaning to post this for over a week. With all the discussion of FriendFeed being a bit of an echo chamber these days, I'm aware that this is a post that will appear on FriendFeed talking about FriendFeed but my non-ff or new-to-ff friends have been asking about how to get past what they perceive as noise so, here we are.
First, let me say that I don't see the FriendFeed constant stream of information as noise. Maybe it's just how my brain works but all that stimulus is exciting and engaging, especially considering how much of it I find interesting and how much of it I want to comment on or dig into further.
That said, here's what I do to make it even more user-friendly.
1. You'll want to use some greasemonkey scripts (I assume you're using firefox)
FriendFeed Highlight Your Comments - As the script writer notes, it makes it easier to pick up on conversations where you left off. It also lets you know if your friends are also engaged in the conversation. You can easily see what they are saying.
FriendFeed Read Later - If you use this and hit "later" it creates a "read later" tab in your interface and also adds a like to the item. You'll now be able to go back to that "read later" tab later and dig into links you only glanced at previously. I like this a lot. Particularly for NY Times articles for some reason.
FriendFeed Filters: Friends & Groups - This is a "must have" if you think FF is noisy. I have 3 groups "Most Interesting Friends", "Angelenos" and "People I know" and use it often to parse through my growing friends tab.
FriendFeed By Service - I don't use this one as often and generally only use it for two things - to search for flickr photos (usually on the everyone tab) and to search for last.fm feeds. I might start using it to look for more librarything users, though.
2. You Like Me, You Really Like Me
I always go to the "me" tab first. It's what I have bookmarked and firefox says this is my most favorite link in the world right now. I do a quick scroll down of my page to see if people have liked or commented anything I've posted since the last time I was on. I respond as necessary and then...
2. Whatchu Talkin' 'Bout Willis?!
I make my way over to the Discussion tab (found in the side bar as view all likes and comments) to see what things I liked and/or commented on earlier have had on-going conversations. As people have noted elsewhere, friendfeed has a lot of very robust conversations on content from all over the place. You never know where something is going to go and who is going to chime in. Again, I respond and/or participate as necessary.
Then...
3. Friends, How Many of Us Have Them?
I spend the vast majority of my time right here on the Friends Tab. First, I do a quick scroll down to see what people are posting right now. This is the noisiest my FF experience gets. The 150+ people I subscribe to are all aggregated here, the friends of friends content, along with the rooms I've joined and some of them, like the lastfmfeeds room could dominate the entire page. But, this is often how I find gems of content I wouldn't find otherwise.
I do my requisite comments and likes and then I filter. I tend to go with best of day and then People I Know. If I haven't been thrown on some tangential journey, I may go to my Most Interesting Friends filter or Angelenos but I usually have seen most of those folks by this point so I use those groups much less often.
Now...
5. I Give You Much More
Now, it's time to participate. Since I'm a very lazy blogger, I'm an active friendfeeder by doing the following -
A. I post links. Early on, I would just share or share with note from Google Reader but I find that posts with images and a pull-quote garner much more interest (I know they do for me). So, I tend to go directly to the source and use my bookmarklet or shareaholic to submit links to FF. I stay away from techie stuff. There are already way too many social media nerds posting that stuff. I like music, books, movies, comic books, words, words of wisdom, TV stuff, food pr0n, and stuff black people like. My feed reflects that, I think.
B. I put stuff on my amazon wishlist. You'd be amazed how many conversations crop up around products/media.
C. I favorite and publish images to flickr. FriendFeed has changed the way I use flickr. I would rarely search for images before. I would just track what my friends were posting and be done. Now, after seeing how other people use the service, I do daily searches around the things that have been in my field of vision for the day (yesterday it was "poketo" and "rooftop pool party") and favorite the images I find. It has enriched my experience on flickr incredibly and I've been using that site since 2004, if not before.
D. I youtube much more often.
E. I Librarything - although, the jury is still out here. I still haven't found an online book community/service that does for me what last.fm does for music.
F. I blog...sometimes.
6. Rinse. Repeat.
You'd be surprised (or maybe not) but I spend hours a day doing this. And I love every minute of it.
And, not to evangelize a tool (I did the same thing with Twitter last year right around South By) but the "friend" part of friendfeed is not just some cute alliteration and a smart name for a product. I've met several new people who have become significant acquaintances in a short time. Unlike even my favorite online social media tools - last.fm and twitter - by "liking" and "commenting" on FF, you find yourself connecting with strangers quickly but because of similar interests and/or engaged conversation.
With Twitter, I've always been much more interested in talking with the people I know in real world terms. My people. My posse. With last.fm, I connect to people across similar music tastes but these are very passive relationships. With friendfeed, however, I've met new random people and we are talking about stuff that matters to each of us.
And, it's fun.