For FriendFeed has become my replacement for Google Reader, which I only visit occasionally now to see if there are blogs I need to add to my feed.

But, if you are going to replace a reader with FriendFeed, how do you manage the flow of content. While tools will likely improve over time, I have adopted a simple strategy.

1) Scan for items with obvious links

As I power through the front page of my feed, I look for items that are obviously links to longer articles. I can then decide if I want click through to that article. But rather than opening it in a new tab right in front of me, I use the wheel-click option in Firefox and open these articles in a background tab. This allows me to scan through the fees and read the articles when I want.

2) Read Twitter/indenti.ca/Jaiku/etc. last

Personal conversations come second for me. If there is a thread I am interested in, I will wheel click the Twitter page for the person and pick it up that way…or use Twitter Search. Being the kind of person who processes personal communications last makes this easier.

3) Use the FriendFeed interface as much as I can

If there was a way to open posts in a frame such as the way that video and images are embedded in FriendFeed, I would never go to anyone’s actual site. While that may be a feature of the future, the storage implementation for the FriendFeed team is potentially enormous – unless they choose to retrieve the content on the fly.

And finally…

4) Gripe about TinyURL, etc. links and how I don’t know where they lead

A great feature of the future for FriendFeed would be to translate obfuscated URLs to their base URLs in a rollover

And there you have it. Not the world’s most intense primer on using FriendFeed, but it works for me!