Friendfeed recently added IM to their growing list of features. And while I’m not a traditional Friendfeed user (I rarely post or comment directly there), it has changed how I manage my micromessaging stuff (Identi.ca, Twitter etc.) along with all the social network-ey stuff I run into. Here’s my current setup:

I have a Friendfeed account. I have personally hooked up my Twitter, Identi.ca, blog feed, and Delicious feeds in Friendfeed. This means that whenever I do something on any of these services, it get’s posted in my Friend Feed.

But what Friendfeed is doing for me lately is something I find much more useful. It provides a one-stop shop for receiving status updates that people make in a variety of services and most importantly provides this is in a very near-realtime way via IM. 

So instead of having to monitor a Twitter IM Window (wait.. Twitter still doesn’t supply IM does it?), and an Identi.ca IM Window, everything flows into a single IM window.

Now this all works best if the person I’m following has an account on Friendfeed and has his services all hooked up there, but even if he doesn’t, I have Friendfeed’s “imaginary friend” feature as a workaround. It goes something like this:

Say JoeSchmo is not on Friendfeed.. or maybe JoeSchmo is on Friendfeed, but has failed to hook up his Identi.ca feed over there. Well, for him, I can create an imaginary Friendfeed friend (and call him “JoeSchmo” or whatever I want) and hook up his identi.ca feed myself - provided I know his identi.ca username. In fact, I can hook or unhook any of the services I want for Joe. So if Joe posts a lot of pictures of his pet snake on Flickr I can filter his feed not to show me those Flickr posts. 

It’s all very customizable. The only aggravating part is when someone has a Friendfeed account but hasn’t hooked up his Identi.ca feed to it. In this case I have to make an imaginary friend entry for him just to get that identi.ca feed into the Friendfeed stream. No big whup, but aggravating.

The only thing I can’t figure out is why Identi.ca (and other services) are not listed in the FIRST PAGE of service choices on Friendfeed. I mean, there’s a link to ‘all 49 services’ but I think most people miss this and assume only those 3 or 4 status services are available.

Here’s a screenshot showing the first page of services shown to the user. And following this a second screenshot showing All Services available. There’s really not that much of a difference IMO. Why not show the user ALL services right from the get-go. There are so many people I’m finding who are technically saavy but have not hooked up their identi.ca feeds presumably because they think it’s not available to them.

Here’s the first page of offered services:

And here’s the “All 49 Services” listing:

And here’s what my Friendfeed chat window looks like on my work machine (using Google Chrome):

So there you have it. My current microblogging workaround solution. Do you have a better one? Why not post about it in the comments.