FriendBinder Puts All Your Friends in One Place

FriendBinder is a service that has been in closed beta for over a year now. At first glance, it’s just another social aggregator like FriendFeed, but a closer look shows that they’re headed in a slightly different direction. Your average aggregator just pulls in your activity from a bunch of different sources. Most operate just like FriendFeed, providing minimal interaction between the source and the actual aggregator service. For example, FriendFeed pulls in your Facebook items, but you can’t Like or Comment those items and have those likes and comments show up back on Facebook.

Rather than pulling in your content from your social sites, FriendBinder grabs the activity of all the people you’re friends with on those services. Think of it as if you’ve combined your Twitter stream, with your Facebook Wall. Rather than having to visit Facebook or Twitter, you just go to FriendBinder to see both. Unlike most other services, you can actually respond and interact with your friends right in FriendBinder. Supported services also include: YouTube, Last.fm, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, and Custom RSS Feeds.

If you’re like me and always looking for a way to keep up with everything, a light bulb should have just went on in your head. Sure, an aggregator combines your personal content in one place so that others can see it. Does this really help you to keep up with others? Not really. FriendBinder takes the opposite approach and brings your friends to you.

FriendBinder strictly imports the networks you already participate on, so you don’t have to worry about friending people all over again. As a matter of fact, your friends don’t even need to be members for you to see their activity. Besides simply importing your friends’ content, there are a few other features that help you keep things organized and manageable:

• Tags – Tag your friends with whatever keywords apply, then filter your stream based on those tags. Tags are definitely the best way I’ve seen to manage a large group of contacts. The hardest part is figuring out where people fit in, but that could just be me.
• Interest Level – Each contact or content source in FriendBinder can have up to a 5-star rating. We sometimes value some people’s content slightly more than others. Now, you can really prioritize your friends’ streams to make sure you don’t miss anything important.
• Networks – Easily see what networks you and a friend are connected on.
• Merge Contacts – Your friends may have different names across different services. This feature allows you to merge those contacts into one.

FriendBinder looks pretty useful so far, but i’d definitely like to see them add a bunch more social networks. Not saying they have to be all-inclusive as that’s going to be difficult, but the more Networks I can combine the better.

(props to Louis Gray)