Facebook continues to inch closer to competing with FriendFeed. Today the social network announced eight more services that you can import into the Mini-Feed on your profile. These include: YouTube, StumbleUpon, Hulu, Pandora, Last.fm, and Google Reader.
As we noted last month, you can’t really compare the services directly because whereas Facebook is simply aggregating the data and allowing you to do nothing with it, FriendFeed is predicated on conversations about this imported data. Still, one could imagine such a feature may be coming one day to Facebook as well.
Facebook also differs in that this importing of data is a very small feature of its expansive social network. One could have easily thought Facebook would kill a service like Twitter when it launched its Status Update feature for profiles, but that obviously hasn’t happened yet.
Previously, Facebook allowed you to import data from Flickr, Picasa, Digg, Yelp and Del.icio.us. I personally didn’t see too many of my friends using this feature, but perhaps the large expansion will help. I, for one, know that the Google Reader import will be useful to me as will the Blog/RSS import. However, unlike with FriendFeed, you can only import one blog/feed, which will force users to choose between their favorite sites.
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One of the interesting additions here is the online premium video streaming site, Hulu. Apparently anytime you rate a show you watch there, it will be ported into Facebook. It would be a lot cooler if you could hit a button to embed an episode into your mini-feed.
We attended the small Facebook event earlier this week where the company showed off the upcoming profile changes. As we noted at the time, Facebook made it clear that there would be more of an emphasis on importing third-party data into the site. Consider this a first step.
FriendFeed continues to expand its service as well. Yesterday it rolled out a new “Rooms” feature, which allows for more focused conversations.
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