I have been playing around with the next flavour of the month friendfeed.  For the uninitiated, friend feed allows users to aggregiate all the social media feeds into one place, see my friend feed here friendfeed.com/trevorginn. Friendfeed has the following difference to other aggregator sites (or certainly plaxo and facebook)

• The friend feed can be made publically available so a logon is not required
• Other users can comment on items in the feeds

There is no denying that this is a very user friendly tool but I can’t help thinking that it is not all that different from other sites which aggregiate feeds such as Facebook and Plaxo and also pretty easy to emulate.  Will it be the twodogs* of the social network market, popular until everyone else bought out exactly the same thing.

* a popular alcopop which faded from view when everyone else realised that it was easy to mix neat ethanol with fizzy pop and sell it to teenagers.

I had never used twitter much until the last few days and I am getting quite into it.  I think it is a great tool for the following reasons:

• Communicating with friends and colleagues.  By using twitter, you can broadcast your activities to an interested audience, promoting activities such as blogging or speaking engagements.
• Adding interactivity to a blog or other online profile.  Writing a blog post takes time, but updating your status is easy.  By adding a status box to your blog will add more frequently updated content
• Updating status across multiple social networks (see below)

Some businesses including eBay are using twitter as a communication tool.  I note however that eBay has less than 100 followers.

One of the reasons why I hadn’t used Twitter previously was that I thought that it would be too time consuming to publish regular updates.  However I have discovered some shortcuts to automate some of the publishing.

Integration with Facebook and MySpace

Using the Facebook Twitter app, Facebook status and tweeks can be synced so that one will update the other.  There is also a wordpress plugin for updating myspace status.  This obviously means that you can use twitter to create a single status across all your social network profiles 

Integrate with Blogs

Using a service such as twitterfeed, when you post to your blog a tweet will appear on your twitter feed.  This is a great way of publicising your blog to people following your twitter feed.

Alongside my new online baby shop, I have launched a networks for parents called Hello Baby Network. The site is run using ning.com, a service which allows people to build their own social networks. 

The idea is to provide a build a social network around the shop allowing customer to meet people with similar interests i.e. other parents.

So if you are a parent or expecting sometime soon, or perhaps all your friends of got kids and you want to see what all the fuss is about, please join up, it is free.

eBay has just launched a facebook Application called eBay Marketplace .  This is hot on the heals of their eBay to go application for listing products on blogs and other websites.

This is clearly a no brainer for eBay as Facebook and other social media sites are expanding so rapidly.  The marketplace place app lets users monitor their eBay activity from their facebook account and promote their items to other facebook member. A quick look at the functionality reveals the following:

• Items are listed on your facebook profile, but not in the facebook marketplace
• Items have links to bid and buy, but these direct the user to eBay
• You can allow users to see the items you are watching, items you are selling, sold and unsold (hmmm not sure if I want to show people what I am watching….)

There has been quite a few developments in this space recently.  Buy.com’s launched its Garage sale application, which allows items to be listed and bought through Facebook. 

Ztail report that eBay items listed on social media sites see huge increases in traffic.  From this point of view I think that eBay are missing a bit of trick not taking their product further and allowing people to bid directly the facebook site.  Unlike this eBay app, Ztail shares the affiliate income with its users.

I think that the future for this type of application is to allow eBay users to list them items in the Facebook marketplace, and to integrate the eBay checkout into facebook, allowing an integrated experience.  eBay should also expand the application to cover classified sites such as its own Gumtree, and Craigs list.

It would be difficult not to notice the staggering growth of Facebook over the last few months.  Facebook now has 31 million members across the globe and its growth has been so large that some people are talking of it as the new Microsoft.

Where there are members there is the potential to acquire customers, promote your business and drive traffic to your site or eBay listings.  After playing around with Facebook over the last few days, I have come up with a list of ways in which it can be used to your business.

Connect with your business contacts

Chances are that your colleagues and business contacts are on Facebook already.  Invite them to become your friends and join your company network (if you have one - see below). Facebook is a much more friendly and interactive environment than social networks like Linkedin and can be used to form closer bonds with your contacts.

Create a profile for your company

To create a foothold on Facebook, create a profile for your company and a company network. This will allow you to do the following things:

• Invite your business colleagues, and customers to become your friends, creating a facebook network around your business.
• Make postings which will appear in your facebook friends newsfeeds.  These can be about special offers and company news such as job postings.
• List your items in the facebook marketplace (see below)

Promote your Blog 

If you have a company or personal blog, this can be imported into your facebook notes.  Your posting will then appear in your newsfeed and that of your friends.

Facebooks notes settings can be accessed from the applications menu in the LHS of your profile page.

List your items in the marketplace

Facebook has a marketplace where items can be listed for sale.  This is free and could be used promote items for sale on your website or eBay.  Products such as Ztail, make listing items on facebook marketplace easy.

Write an Facebook application

Finally, if you think that there is a real opportunity for your business on Facebook, you should look into developing an application.  Applications can help you develop friends and drive traffic to your website.  Last.fm were one of the first companies to boost their business through a facebook application.

The sign the Facebook is a force to be reckoned with is that there are facebook only businesses developing.  An example of a business which uses facebook is Social flowers, which enables facebook members to send each other flowers.