Today, BigOven.com became the first recipe sharing site to support FriendFeed(tm), a rapidly-growing social network aggregation service.
This service is completely free, and in beta. (Please send beta feedback here, thanks!)
What does this mean, and why is this useful?
About FriendFeed: FriendFeed makes it possible to update all of your social contacts at once on the web activity you generate.
With a 2 minute account setup at FriendFeed.com, you'll get a single, consolidated "stream" view of all your web activity -- whether that's posts you might make on your blog, photos you might upload to flickr or Picasa, videos you might post to YouTube, messages you might send on Twitter, or more.
Better yet, you can subscribe or view your friend and family's streams, seeing their consolidated activity in a single glance as it happens, and staying in touch with things they like and don't like. For instance, you can see our founder's FriendFeed here: http://friendfeed.com/stevemur. Or, a much more prolific FriendFeeder, journalist and tech-blogger, here: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer .
And now, BigOven is part of the fun. In fact, we're the first foodie social network to directly integrate with FriendFeed. We're all about sharing great recipes, and FriendFeed is all about sharing what you have to say on the Web with others, easily.
Once you get FriendFeed added to your BigOven account (takes about 1 minute), every time you post a recipe, or upload a photo or a video, or rate a recipe highly with 4 or 5 stars, BigOven will automatically add it to your FriendFeed stream. These streams can then be subscribed-to by your friends, added to your blog or website, shown on your Facebook profile, or many other places.
It's a great way to alert friends and family when you do something interesting on the web. FriendFeed and our service are completely free.
And it's simple!
1) You'll need a free FriendFeed account. Get one here.
2) After you've created FriendFeed account, visit www.bigoven.com/friendfeed to tell BigOven which alerts to send on your FriendFeed. Simply check the boxes you'd like to send.. that's it! (You can return to this page at any time either via the direct link, or your "My Settings" area, which can be reached from your chef page's "Edit My Page" button.)
(Note that BigOven never sees your FriendFeed username and password, only the "RemoteKey", which is public, and can be reset by you at any time.)
After you click "authorize", your friends will see your stream like this:
Questions you may have:
1. Can you tell me more about the relationship between you two companies?
There's no business relationship between us, we at BigOven.com just think it's cool.
2. Will alerts be sent if I don't want them to be sent?
Just uncheck any boxes for the alerts you want to remove from your FriendFeed.
3. Does this apply only to recipes posted from the browser, or does the desktop recipe software work this way too?
Alerts are added to your FriendFeed whether you post from the web or your desktop. And recipe ratings work the same way, if you've checked the box "share this on BigOven.com" in your desktop application when rating a recipe.