How a Business Could Use Friendfeed For Collaboration

I was squinting at Friendfeed today, and I realized that it could really work nicely as a business collaboration tool in a few different ways. Between all the various aggregation points, and the “rooms” function, I think the platform has everyone one would need to cook up a collaboration environment. Here’s what I mean.

Information Inputs

You could configure the following inputs of data to Friendfeed for your team’s account:

* RSS feeds for blogs and other items that are RSS enabled, like status messages and cooked search.

* Flickr Flickr photo group input to capture event and staff photos.

* Delicious bookmarks to capture research.

* Twitter/Jaiku/Identi.ca/whatever to capture team status messages.

* SlideShare input to capture pertinent presentations.

* Upcoming.org to map out potential useful company events.

* YouTube YouTube to gather up pertinent video.

Add to this a “room” for your group to see all this information in one place, and you’ve built quite an interesting data aggregator.

What Comes Next

For collaboration, Friendfeed has a built in discussion mechanism that’s outside of all those other streams. It has mobile input and other 3rd party services, so you can reach the platform even while out in the field, allowing for more than one use. It allows for textured sharing and hiding, commenting, and instant discussions.

Have information that you need to keep private? Make a group, and keep it invite-only. Put that kind of information in the group area and not the public timeline.

This is not only viable, it’s really actionable. There are several implementations I can imagine:

* News desk.

* Writing topic gathering station.

* Community center.

* Online project team.

* Citizen Journalism group.

* Virtual street team.

Does it make sense to you? Can you see other applications? It just strikes me that a team use could be very powerful. Who knows? Maybe some folks are already doing this. Point them out in the comments.