Friendfeed, the aggregating social network now has an interesting feature: if you use Twitter, you can automatically post your Friendfeed activity as Tweets.

Friendfeed is ideal for pulling together all your updates on Flickr, Del.icio.us, Flickr or other online social networks. Twitter is rapidly becoming the de facto service for letting the world know what you are up to and has a network far exceeding that of Friendfeed (just check out Google Trends). Tying these two services together provides a great opportunity to broadcast the updates you make to your social networking accounts.

It works something like this:

To set this up, go into your Friendfeed account settings and at the bottom of the page you will see the 'Feed Publishing' options. Select the "Post my FriendFeed entries on Twitter" option and enter your Twitter account details. That's pretty much it.

I have to say that in some respects, this service could be seen as a necessary fight for survival for Friendfeed. Like the video wars of the early 'Eighties, there is only really enough space for one player in the market (if you recall, VHS took the lead and effectively eradicated Betamax). As users we suffer fatigue, and really don't want to be tied to too many competing services. Friendfeed does have some advantages over Twitter in terms of its aggregation possibilities and the recently-updated interface, but Twitter, and the micro-blogging revolution it is fueling is definitely stealing the limelight. In effect, Friendfeed could be construed as being another one of the API services available to Twitter.

In case you are new to either of these services, here's some tutorials to help explain how they work:

Friendfeed explained

Twitter explained

Welcome to the second installment in the Slideschool Series: Twitter explained.

This presentation takes you through the basics of why Twitter is such an important communication tool and how you go about making the most of the service.

In a nutshell, these are the main features of Twitter:

• Stripped down blogging: no titles, categories and only 120 characters of text. Why? So it's easy to produce and easy to read quickly, using either the web or mobile (SMS).
• A sizeable network who you can follow, or who can choose to follow you. The short, pithy posts make it easy to scan through a thread quickly.
• A robust API that has allowed a number of services to be built on top of Twitter

On the subject of those useful Twitter services, let me list some of the ones I find most useful:

Twitbin: A great add-on for all you Firefox users out there - view updates and post directly from your browser.

Twitterfeed: This is great if you want to further promote your blog on Twitter - your blog posts are excerpted as Twitter posts with links back to the original.

Twitter badges: Place a widget on your homepage, Facebook profile, etc. using this handy application that will list your latest messages.

Twhirl: A popular desktop app for Twitter that lets you get round that pesky browser.

Hashtags tracking: Twitter's hashtags allow you to pull together content on a similar topic. This handy service allows you to search these topics.

If you find other services particularly useful, feel free to let me know and I'll update this list.

Go ahead and jump in now! You can follow me at twitter.com/cagedether/.

Corporate blogging stalwart and pioneer Robert Scoble recently caught up with Ed Cone of CIO Insight to answer a few questions about how far we've come and the degree to which companies have fully embraced this new communication form.

Scoble talks of the pervasiveness of email (despite the incumbent pain points) - a communication which is particularly ill-suited to collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Interestingly, he also highlights FriendFeed, a service on which he has been active (you can find him here), as a prime example of a social networking aggregator that collects all your online activity in one handy location. If this is new to you, check out this article on Friendfeed explained.

More on the interview

The Problogger team really do a good job of pulling together top tips from many respected corporate bloggers. Putting together an editorial calendar, not worrying too much about a unified voice and how you implement an editing process are all covered in this detailed post.

They finish on probably the most important point: establish a measurement program. I think this really could be the subject of a blog post all on its own. Hmm, now there's a thought.

Read the full Problogger article

Amber Morris has written a great post detailing how blogging differs from other forms of corporate communications. If any of you follow blogs or have been writing blogs for sometime, this is nothing new. However, with more and more companies making the leap into corporate blogging (often lead by the same marketing folk responsible for the brochureware), the point is an important one.

Unlike almost any other form of corporate communications, blogging is about entering into the dialogue with your market. Know who your audience is and address it directly on its terms. If you must sell, then sell stories rather than products.

I remember reading a while back that the hardest thing for a radio presenter to do is address the audience when you can't see them. One piece of advice there is to think of just one person and talk directly to them. The same can be said of blogging.

Read more about the writing tone of blogs

Silicon Alley Insider offers more insights into how to use micro-blogging to expand your current communications reach.

Bunch of links and case studies keep this post relevant.

Check it out

IT Pro has a good round-up of what the word on the ground was at this year's Blog World Expo. Remembering that communication is a two-way street was one of the messages. Remember to listen!

You also need to remember that you are the expert - the one working in your field day in day out. Spreading some of this worldly wisdom can go a long way.

It's hard to find posts these days on corporate blogging that don't involve Twitter. IT Pro gives some indication as to how companies can use this and the interrelation between blogging and Tweeting.

Kate's Digital Update highlights a point by Steve Rubel that it will be the consumer that shapes future media. She offers this up in contrast to Scoble and Israel's recommendations in Naked Conversations that you should look within the corporation when it comes to setting up a corporate blog.

It's an interesting point, and personally I'd agree with her that both viewpoints need to be taken into account. As much as talking to your customers could give you the perfect model for your blog, you still need to work with what resources you have in your organization.

This situation would change if we arrived at the stage where the customer actually molds the company (especially the marketing effort). How far off is this? Hmm...

Read Kate's post