Why everyone should be using FriendFeed

There are many, many different social services on the web, and we can’t have accounts at all of them, it’d get too confusing and frustrating having to monitor them all.

Enter FriendFeed.  FriendFeed is a service that takes all other social networks you are  a member of and aggregates them into a single feed, which is much easier to read through by your friends.

FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook in 2009, and is able to link to your many online accounts, intelligently taking posts, comments and ratings and displaying them in an automated feed.

Once you link your various accounts to your FriendFeed account, you don’t need to do anything else, your comments and submissions on all the various accounts will be aggregated together for your friends to see without any effort on your part.

As well as be accessed on it’s own custom url, FriendFeed can also be added as a tab on your Facebook profile:

This really is an invaluable service.  No longer do you need to spam every url of an article you like, or a youtube video you find finny, but instead can rate those things from their own services and let FriendFeed pick it up.  This leaves your Facebook and Twitter accounts cleaner and more appealing to follow by your peers.

So by creating a FriendFeed account, you’re helping your friends link to all the communities you are apart of, but also helping them by reducing the Facebook and Twitter spam posts and keeping links in a nicer more manageable interface.

So give it a try and make an account!

Comparison of Android Barcode Apps

Comparison of Android Barcode Scanners:

There are quite a few barcode scanners on Android Market, and until now I have installed all of them, but have been unable to make up my mind of which to keep and use.  This is a quick side by side comparison table to show the different features, and then a brief conclusion to explain why I have chosen which apps are worth installing and using.

CNET Scan & Shop is exactly the same as Shop Savvy but adds CNet Reviews, so completely pointless and a megabyte larger for no reason.

SnapTell and Google Goggles have almost the exact same functionality, but SnapTell offers reading from an existing image, however unless you plan to take photos and scan them at later dates there’s not enough difference to warrant having both.

Barcode Scanner offers very little in terms of shopping functionality, but is the only app to offer QR Barcode scanning, which is good for sharing contacts and other things.  It’s also less than a megabytes so still worth having.

Edit: As mentioned in the comment below by Randy, ShopSavvy will have QR Code reader functionality too.

Google Shopper is US prices only, whereas Google Goggles offers international prices.

Compare everywhere offers nothing over any of the other apps.

Conclusion

The only apps worth installing are:
Google Goggles and Shop Savvy.  It is worth having both as Shop Savvy is better for barcode scanning as it has a price comparison screen which allows at a glance viewing of the best price available, but Google Goggles offers photo scanning of products and not just barcodes.

Also Barcode Scanner is a nice app to have – not for shopping as it offers nothing unique in that department – but it offers QR Code scanning, which is cool for sharing contacts and reading stored information.

App	Price	QR Barcodes	Text search	Barcode scan	Photo scan	Overview with price comparison?	Local results	Web results
Compare Everywhere	Free	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Barcode Scanner	Free	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
CNET Scan & Shop	Free	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Google Goggles	Free	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Linked
Shop Savvy	Free	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
SnapTell	Free	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Linked