At the very surface, FriendFeed might sound a lot like the new Facebook. FriendFeed aggregates your social life — things that you do on Flickr, Twitter, blogs you publish (or read) — into a central point. Going beyond that, it takes each one of those individual content pieces and creates conversation points around them. Some are worth discussing, some are worth hiding. Either way, the point is to make the content that’s being consumed more social.

Let’s take a specific example. I’ve got a tremendous amount of respect for Jeremiah Owyang and the level of thought he brings into business strategy with social media. I subscribe to his FriendFeed. Any piece of content that he consumes and brings into FriendFeed creates a conversation around that topic. Anyone subscribed can comment any of those content pieces. Anyone of these people can add real value to the conversation, and when they do, I’m likely to subscribe to that feed, too. It allows me to refine the 8 trillion web pages Google indexes into a few conversations about the things I’m really interested in. That, to me, is valuable.

FriendFeed doesn’t come without it’s hurdles. One of the most common complaints is the amount of “noise” it creates. FriendFeed currently supports 59 services for you to import your content from. Instead of following 1 Twitter user, I could potentially be following up to 59 sources from 1 person. That could get to be overwhelming, and an overwhelming experience isn’t something I’m likely to go back to.

I’m getting sold on FriendFeed. Hopefully this demonstration will invite you to join, too.

A Gentle Introduction to FriendFeed: Publish to Twitter and Hide Entries from Matt Albiniak on Vimeo.

If you have any questions or problems with the tutorial, please leave a comment. The only dumb question is the one not asked, so please don’t be shy. I’d love to help you get past your frustrations!

Log Me In is a great (free and secure) application to let other users connect to your computer. It’s used during conference calls for product demonstrations, it’s used by computer technicians to work on customers computers, and it’s used by my dad to save us both a lot of frustration.

This short video tutorial covers the first half of that process: installing and configuring Log Me In on your computer using Mac OS X and Firefox. The process is similiar on Windows, but I’d be happy to create a video for Windows users if the need is out there (hint: leave a comment and ask for it).

As always, if you have any questions, get stuck, or need more help - add a comment below this post!

1. Wordpress 2.7 came out last night. This new version has a drastically different admininstrative dashboard (the part bloggers, writers, and site owners use). Knowing this change was coming, it didn’t really make sense to publish tutorials and content for the dated 2.6 layout.
2. Herman Miller just sent me a brand-stinking-new Herman Miller Embody chair. It’s awesome, and this is exactly what I needed to feel good about sitting for insanely long amounts of time.

The time is coming near. Stay tuned.

Herman Miller, Embody. from Matt Albiniak on Vimeo.

For now, play with Google Insights for Search.

Additional examples showcase some different ways of using Google Insights for Search. Whether you’re an advertising agency, a small business owner, a multinational corporation, or an academic researcher, Insights for Search can help you gauge interest in pertinent search terms.

An introduction to Facebook Lexicon, by one pretty smart Facebook engineer:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=13856412130 

Next, a demonstration of the current Lexicon using trending topics:
http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/index.php?q=midterm,%20final
(hint: refresh the page to get new suggestions, and also check out more help.) 

Now, a peek at the next version of Lexicon:
http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/new/?topic_2=–none–&map_normalize=0&country=US&maps=&topic=hockey 
(hint: check out associations, sentiment, etc.) 

There’s some great information in this to really help some drill down into the niche. Is it relevant for all? No, but that’s where Google Trends comes in. We’ll come back to both of these in far more detail, but a little later on. Information about your audience can’t get much more current than this.

Stay tuned!

The purpose of this blog is to assemble non-technical tutorials to let you, the entrepreneur, remain focused on your core competency while still catching the interactive marketing boat. I won’t bore you with statistics, but marketers are jumping ship in droves from traditional marketing to social and interactive marketing. If you’re not sure what either of those are, you’re in the right place. If you’d like to be notified of new tutorial entries, you can subscribe to this blog by email or RSS. If you don’t know what RSS is, that’s on the topic list. Don’t worry.

If you have a question, comment, or idea for a tutorial, leave a comment anywhere in this blog, find me on Facebook, or email me. 

The next post will walk through setting up your own blog, from start to finish, no geeks required.