FriendFeed: How to personalise your profile.

One of the criticisms of FriendFeed is the limited amount of personalisation options compared to similar sites. Users can’t create custom layouts as they can on MySpace, or use applications on their profiles as they can on Facebook. While I don’t think the absence of these features is necessarily a bad thing – they are often misused – I can understand why some people might find the site less attractive because of it’s one size fits all nature.

People naturally feel more comfortable in a space they can control and make their own, the fact that they don’t really have the opportunity to do this on FriendFeed may, in part, explain why it’s less popular. However, you do have some options to tweak the site to make it more personal to you, and hopefully in time these will be expanded upon.

So what can you personalise? If you go to your profile page – you can find it at http://friendfeed.com/yourusername – and click ‘Edit profile‘, you will open a menu listing the options available to you.

Add a photograph
Adding a photo of yourself instantly makes you more approachable, which means other members are more likely to subscribe to your feed.

Add a description
Write a biography to tell subscribers a little about yourself. Try to make this friendly and conversational. Don’t make the mistake of using the space to promote your business, or to brag about your guru status in anything. No matter how impressive you think your claims sound, you will deter more people than you attract.

Language
The default language of Friendfeed is English, but you can change this in the profile editing menu. However, at the time of writing there are only 11 to choose from.

Change your theme
Although you don’t have the option to create a custom theme, there is a small selection of off-the-shelf themes available, including an interactive one called Duck Hunt. To change your theme, simply click ‘Change‘ which will take you to the theme directory, where you just click to select one you like.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. At the moment, personalisation seems to take second place to more practical features. As I mentioned above, I do hope this is an area which will be expanded on in the future. Although the site is feature rich, I think many people are deterred because they can’t really make it their own.