Project management does not exist in a vacuum. We have embraced the various new methods of communication to encourage better collaboration and team-work. It is now practically inconceivable for a project not to be using email, tele-conferences, even video-conferencing to maintain contact with the participants.

But are we embracing the new technologies available now? Are we making best use of the tools we now have? With project teams becoming even more spread out over the globe, are we making best use of our new communication methods?

This series will look at the various new social media tools available to us, and how we can start to use them in our projects. Some of you will already be using some of these tools. I’d love to hear your stories about how they have worked for you – many of the uses are only now developing, so I’d love to hear your best practices!

So far in the series, we’ve looked at blogs and Twitter, two social media tools you can use for project management. Today, I am going to introduce to a relative newcomer to the social media world, one which I think is going to become much, much bigger over the next year.

The tool I am looking at today is FriendFeed. Now, the FriendFeed site says it “enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.” That doesn’t sound terribly useful for project management.

However, the important thing to see is that FriendFeed mainly uses something called RSS to gather information. An RSS ‘feed’ is a common way of sharing information – many blogs have them, including this one! But they aren’t limited to blogs – most sites that are regularly updated use them as a way of letting people know when new information is available. (The web has lots of information about RSS. For now, all you need to know is lots of places use it.)

Once this information has been brought in to FriendFeed, anyone can add a comment to it – enabling discussions to take place.

Because FriendFeed uses RSS, and allows you to submit your own chosen RSS feeds, we can build a powerful project management tool.

Now, this post could get very technical here. FriendFeed isn’t the easiest of sites to explain, or to describe. There are a number of places you can go to find out more (try How To Use FriendFeed on Mahalo), and they do a much better job than I can about explaining this!

What I’d like to do, though, is talk in general terms about how you can use FriendFeed in project management. The specific part of FriendFeed that we want to look at is the ability to create “rooms”. These rooms are separate little areas that you can link to different RSS feeds.

Now, when you create a room, you can add what you find useful. For example, we talked last week about Twitter. If you are using Twitter publicly, you can use a special hash tag, such as #myproject, in all of your tweets. You can then do a search for that hash tag to find just those tweets. (Here is an example search for the #superbowl tag.) On the right of the search results you will see a link to “Feed for this query”. It is this link that you need to import into your new FriendFeed room. (Right click the link, and then choose “Copy link location”. This will put that link into your clipboard.)

If you have a blog that you set up for your project, chances are that will have an RSS feed too. You can import that into your FriendFeed room as well.

Now, I imagine some of you are wondering why we would want to do this. Well, now we have added these RSS feeds, every time there is a new post with our hash tag, and every time we update the blog, this will feed through to our new room. And, importantly, this means all of the social media tools we are using to help us in project management are now feeding into one place. Even better, everyone in your project team can join your room, and hold discussions there.

This one room now collects all of the information we are producing and the conversations the team is having. And even better, this information is now fully searchable, right from the FriendFeed room. Once you click into the room, the search box at the top of the page will search only within the room. I am sure you can see the value in being able to search all of your information quickly and easily!

I think this is going to be a fantastic tool for helping collaboration of geographically scattered teams. I’ve barely touched on the functionality of FriendFeed, such as the ability to start a conversation about any posted item, or the ability to ‘Like’ an item to push it to people subscribed to you.

FriendFeed is a huge topic, and one which I can’t cover all of here – not least because I am still finding new ways to use it! I’d really encourage you to get over there and create an account, and to start playing around with it. I’m already on FriendFeed, and you can subscribe to me there, just like you can follow me on Twitter. In addition, I have created a Project Management Guide FriendFeed Room which you are all more than welcome to join. Currently, it has the feeds of a number of PM blogs I read, and a feed of certain Twitter updates – I’ll do a quick post on those tomorrow, if I haven’t exhausted you all!

FriendFeed is really new, and looks like being a really powerful collaboration tool. I can’t stress enough how important I think it is for you to get involved now, to start to get used to it. I’ll see you there!

Part of The Social Media Project Manager Series.