Downing Street now on FriendFeed

With the recent downtime in twitter and the arguments around why this has been happening, I thought I would look at friendfeed as an alternative. I have to admit I like what I see, particularly the ability to create a ‘room’ to host conversations – this could be great for ad-hoc consultation activities. I’m still getting the hang of it, but it seems that friendfeed can offer a better ‘lifestream’ of UK Gov activities than shoveling press notices into twitter.

I’ll probably stick to twitter for the moment because the HMGOV feed works for me (when twitter does). Having said that, while I’m exploring friendfeed I’d like to see news I want come to me, so I’ve started aggregating UK Government feeds – I’ll add more as I find the time.

This isn’t an ‘official’ activity – but the content is. If any civil servants want to take ownership of their stream, or can suggest improvements, let me know and I’ll hand it over/do what I can.

Anyway, for now I thought I’d start with one of the more active government players in the social media space: 10 Downing Street is now on friendfeed.

Her Majesty’s news on twitter – an update

HMGOV

A while back I mentioned that I’d developed an aggregated news feedof UK Government press notices for Twitter. It works for me because twitter is (when it’s working) where I spend a lot of my time online.

The tool was/is far from perfect, and with some very helpful suggestions from Dave Briggs, Simon Dickson, Paul Webster, John Sheridan and a host of other peopleI have managed to improve (I think)  the content by incorporating more feeds, hash-tags and doing a bit of QA on the links. It’s not perfect – but it works for me.

One thing I haven’t been able to do is sit on the end of the account and respond. This is one of the fantastic things about the Downing Street service – civil servants, responding and providing advice in an ‘official’ capacity. This probably explains why I was only recently able to clock just over one hundred subscribers (124 today) - a feat the Downing Street feed was able to achieve in roughly an hour.

As I said in my original post, if there are any civil servants out there that would like to take ownership of the account to make it more two-way, I’m happy to hand it over.