Once again we’re looking at the latest developments in workplace collaboration. ReadWriteWeb has an interesting interview with the brains (who just happen to be the creators of Gmail and Google Maps) behind FriendFeed. The idea behind FriendFeed is to use syndicated feeds from various social networks, plus email, Twitter and chat to create a public template for everyone in a group to share and review pertinent details.

Brett Taylor, co-developer of FriendFeed explains the application to ReadWriteWeb like this: "You could see an aggregated news feed all of the blog post that they
share from Google Reader, the photos that they’ve published on Flickr,
the Twitter messages that they’ve posted and a variety of other sharing
activity aggregated from the most popular social websites on the web
and through the integrated feed. And then it promotes Water Cooler
discussed around those items."

As the name suggests, it’s been designed for personal use — sharing "cool stuff" with friends and family members. But the idea certainly works with co-workers spread out in far-flung locations who regularly work on related projects. Matt and I use a variation of this idea with Gmail, Typepad and Google Docs as we operate in Cardiff, Rome and London, and points in between. The idea of going to a single point to collect and share relevant information is crucial to managing our various projects, news digests, blogs and reports.

– Bernhard