Invite-only friendbinder is a website which allows you to keep track of your friends on several social networking sites. Unlike FriendFeed, these friends do not have to be members of friendbinder in order to follow them.
The site allows you to organise your friends into 5 different ‘interest levels’, so you can separate your actual friends from contacts. Friends can be added from Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us, last.fm, YouTube and Facebook and their RSS feeds can also be added; but contacts from these sites are not automatically grouped together on friendbinder (eg, I must manually tell friendbinder ‘bloggs55′ on Twitter is the same as ‘bloggs55′ on Digg).
friendbinder can be used to update Twitter and Facebook status, which is a nice addition which in essence means you do not have to go on Twitter.
I still find myself questioning the need for friendbinder when we have services like FriendFeed, Ziki and Profilactic. I guess what makes friendbinder unique is the fact you can rank friends in terms of interest. I do, however, find it annoying that so much has to be done manually on the site; whilst all contacts can be imported, accounts on different sites must be manually associated. Sadly, as our partner The Last Podcast pointed out, there are also no RSS feeds from the site itself.
friendbinder is definitely just a binder. It allows all your friends’ social activity to be collated in a central location, whilst having little social networking in itself. The one main feature is that this social activity can be filtered, which I’m sure is essential if, like me, you are following 100s of people but only frequently talk with a dozen of them.
The site, with its last.fm-like design, needs polishing and should become increasingly automated. Social networking junkies will have their uses for the site, but it unfortunately lacks support for several essential networks (such as Friendfeed).
Thanks for reviewing our site, Joe.
In response to the grouping of contacts problem – we did have some code for that, but it’s not that good so I am going to work on some better code for that over the next few days.
In regards to the other sites you mentioned:
friendfeed: As you point out, if you have a lot of friends that don’t use friendfeed (i.e. they are not early adopters but you are) then it’s at best cumbersome and at worst useless (i.e. most of your friends are on facebook, which they don’t support well).
Ziki: I had a look at it, but I can’t see how it helps you keep track of what your friends are doing and they seem to have changed direction since the coverage they got before.
Profilactic: I’ve just tried to use profilactic though it doesn’t seem to have moved on much in the last 18 months and their facebook support doesn’t really do anything (just gives a link to your profile – no updates from friends)
We would like to hear further details of any problems and any suggestions you had so we can make the site better, either in our discussion group, bug tracker or via email. Details here:
http://friendbinder.com/contact_us.php