Not long after FriendFeed went live with realtime social networking they rolled out a feature that lets you search and subscribe to the Twitter followers of any Twitter user.

Naturally I used this for my own Twitter username first. But then I discovered it works for pretty much any username. So I decided to give it a real test. Here’s how I created a FriendFeed list called “Scoble’s Minions”, and subsequently got locked out of FriendFeed.

First, in FriendFeed go to http://friendfeed.com/friends. Click the Twitter button and enter the Twitter username whose friends you want to search for.

After a good while of the spinning progress circle I’m given a screen where I can select which folks I want to subscribe to:

And the list I want to put them in:

Warnings, Caveats, Etc:

• First of all, I have no idea why anyone would want to do this with a user like Robert Scoble, unless you want to introduce a ridiculous amount of noise to your stream or if (like me) you’re just playing around.
• Keep in mind while it adds the users with open feeds to the list you create, it sends a request to those with private feeds. When they accept, it will automatically put them in your Home feed. For me this was a little annoying since my Home feed is tuned to just have the people I want in it. So I had to do some cleanup.
• I’ve noticed a SIGNIFICANT change in the speed of the Add/remove friends screens in FriendFeed, especially when editing friends on my Home feed list. In fact it became nearly impossible to remove people from my Home feed. I sent Robert a DM asking if he has similiar slowness.
• I wonder if doing this can be considered abuse? Perhaps FriendFeed didn’t intend it to be used this way. I’m not sure.

One thing that is for sure, after enough banging around FriendFeed became downright non-responsive. Looks like they’ve blocked the IP address I was using during all my testing of this. Oops!:

UPDATE: My IP is no longer blocked by FriendFeed.