Enhancements

FriendFeed has also updated the "All Rooms" page, which now hides any rooms that have been inactive for a while. This is especially handy now that a lot of people use FriendFeed rooms to live-blog events. Whereas before, these rooms would start cluttering your interface pretty quickly, they are now neatly hidden.

It's also now a lot easier to see who is subscribed to any given room, though the ability to search for rooms is still not available.

Also new is the option to immediately choose a friend list for any new friends you subscribe to (see screenshot).

Cleaner and Simpler

Overall, the new interface looks considerably cleaner. Our only complaint is that it is sometimes not quite clear if you are surfing the "Everyone" or the 'Home" tab. The color of the active tab changes from dark blue to black, which is just a bit too subtle.

In general, with very few exceptions, the reactions from FriendFeed users have been positive so far .

If you've never used FriendFeed before, it's a must-see application for sharing and discussing cool stuff on the web. This new feature addition is going to make it even better.

These simple, smart settings offer a whole lot of powerful possibilities. I've never set up particular bundles of friends on FriendFeed, but now that I could get just items from them on IM, I probably will for co-workers, trailblazers, etc.

The way that the company handled commenting on multiple items, by assigning a number to each and requiring an @# reply, is really smart.

Making it this friction-free to monitor and contribute to conversations has the potential to increase participation in FriendFeed by orders of magnitude.

The Down Sides

There's no way to get an IM when someone "likes" an item, which would be a nice option to have.

Unfortunately, there's still no ability to subscribe to searches inside FriendFeed. We would really like to get IMs from FriendFeed when anyone on the service mentions our new site Jobwire, and we'd like to be able to post a reply to them from inside IM as well. Not yet, though!

So come join us on FriendFeed and we can discuss the awesome things we find online - instantly!

Friendfeed already gives you real-time notifications over IM, which also let you comment on items from your IM client through a small set of very easy to use commands. The notifier also allows you to comment on an item, but sadly, the app takes you to the Friendfeed web site to do so. You can, however, like an item right from the pop-up window on your desktop.

As with a lot of real-time notification services, the amount of updates can quickly become overwhelming and distracting. Being able to restrict updates to certain groups is nice, but it would be great if FriendFeed also gave you the option to only see certain types of items (blog posts, Google Reader shares, etc.) in your real-time stream.

It would also be great if you could set a persistent search and then get real-time updates from across the Friendfeed network whenever somebody uses a certain keyword. It is pretty clear that search is becoming one of the key features on Twitter, and Friendfeed, even though it has fewer users, aggregates a wider range of content, though it is currently not really doing a lot with this data.

The first prediction is about the battle for users and mind-share that has emerged this year between Twitter and FriendFeed.

Some early adopters of Twitter have migrated to FriendFeed due to Twitter's outages. However, as of May 2008, Compete counts only 304,574 monthly U.S. visitors for FriendFeed versus 1.725 million for Twitter. So we're asking:

How many monthly U.S. visitors will FriendFeed have for July 2008 according to Compete?

What do you think? Make your prediction and check out what other RWW readers think will happen.

Sadly, video files are not on the list of accepted formats. Yet. And users can only upload three MP3s in a 24-hour period. However, other file types, from PSDs to RTFs, are accepted and up- and downloadable.

Users can click the posted links to download files. With MP3s specifically, an embedded media player appears in the post.

Users can also choose to post via email, sending files as attachments to share@friendfeed.com. Naturally, there's a file-size limit, as well, which we hit pretty quickly while trying to upload a large Photoshop file and were given a simple "Could not upload" error message in return.

There's no pause or cancel button on uploads, and there are no clear guidelines yet on exactly what the size upload limits are, either for single files or cumulative daily uploads. Another missing link is a possible expiration date on uploaded files. While these questions remain unanswered, the biggest question in our minds is why the implementation of this feature took so long in the first place.

That top 10 comes directly from the like compatibility index - it shows you the top ten users from the compatibility bar graph. If you authenticate with FriendFeed within FeedStats, you'll also be able to subscribe to the users in your top 10 right from the site itself.

Besides the charts and graphs, there isn't much more to FeedStats. Still, it's definitely a great way to help you find more people to subscribe to on FriendFeed. Not only can you discover who you're most compatible with, you can put in the names of some of your favorite FriendFeeders to see who they're compatible with too. This is much better than any sort of "suggested users" feature since it's just going to show you people who like the same things you do. We only wish that it would show you if you were already subscribed to the various folks it finds. Maybe in a future release?

FriendFeed had tweaked the beta design over the last few weeks and introduced 'friend lists,' which allow you to organize your friends into different categories and help you to tone down the noise in your main feed. Today, FriendFeed made this beta interface the default for all users.

You can find our review of FriendFeed's latest design change here.

Duplicates

Duplicate shares were always the most annoying aspect of FriendFeed. Whenever a story breaks, a large number of your friends are likely to share it through various services, which creates a lot of noise in your main feed. Now, FriendFeed will group these entries together. Your main feed will only show the first share, and then give you the option to click through to see who else shared the same item as well. Hopefully, this will also mean that discussions will now become less fragmented, as users will most likely gravitate towards those items that were shared first.

One really nice aspect of this grouping is that it works across services, so shared items from Google Reader, for example, are grouped with Twitter messages (and it works with tinyurls, too).

A lot of us here at RWW are FriendFeed users (we even set up our own room) and we are happy to see that the company is still working hard on improving its service by listening to its users.

There are dozens of ways that Friendfeed adds to the noise. For one, it pulls in one of the noisiest services out there: Twitter. At least 10% of Twitter streams have much to do about nothing and filtering out this noise is hard to do on FriendFeed. Secondly, for those that don't entertain certain services that FriendFeed aggregates, that's extra noise.

For example, I hide all Flickr, Twitter, and Seesmic items unless they have a comment on them. I'm not a heavy user of Flickr nor Seesmic and most of the items that my friends on FriendFeed may be sharing from these services, I probably wouldn't be very interested in. At the same time, some services that I have FriendFeed aggregate may be completely irrelevant to another member of the community.

Adding to the Conversation

One of the most popular reasons for being on FriendFeed is for the conversations and not necessarily for the lifestreaming part of the equation. This leads to a plethora of discussions on FriendFeed. Even Scoble has gone as far as calling it a "talk show". Infamous "Bitchmemes" develop overnight on FriendFeed. It can remind users of a Harry Potter duel, though instead of wands and spells, there are words and links to back up the facts.

At the same time, users of FriendFeed add to the conversation with almost everything that they share...almost. For me, Google Reader Shared Items, RSS feeds and stumbles via StumbleUpon are services that add to the conversation. In fact, the items from these services continuously to start numerous conversations, thereby helping to balance out the noise-to-signal ratio on FriendFeed.

Catch-22

Is there another lifestreaming backlash around the corner? Probably not. While some are questioning the "conversation fragmentation" problem on FriendFeed, it doesn't necessarily add to the noise. The fragmentation is just a byproduct of the same information being shared in more than one network of friends, and users that run in more than one circle that may continuously see the same information. This isn't a problem of FriendFeed, but rather a problem caused by the various groups within FriendFeed, which Julian Baldwin expresses other great thoughts about.

In the end, the question shouldn't be whether or not FriendFeed contributes to the noise or to the conversation, but more about how much FriendFeed is contributing to both sides of the coin. This only reinforces why filtering is the next step to better contribute to the conversation while reducing the noise levels.

With this latest announcement, Facebook is starting to encroach even more on Friendfeed's territory.

Facebook will also handle long comment threats very similar to the way Friendfeed deals with them. The feed will show up to 8 comments by default, with the ability to click and show more - which is exactly the way Friendfeed handles this as well.

Facebook, however, is not going to change the order of items in the Mini-Feed the way Friendfeed does. Friendfeed pushes items with new comments to the top of the page. This approach would probably not be too useful in Facebook, where users typically see far fewer items in their feeds than the typical Friendfeed user.

While Friendfeed aggregates items from a far larger pool of services than Facebook and has a lot of features that Facebook still has to copy, it is clear that Facebook is at least getting some ideas from Friendfeed's (and also Plaxo's) playbook here.

FriendFeed is the new hotness and many people have asked for an API to take the service to the next level. There aren't any example apps built yet, nor has there been much developer feedback yet. A whole lot of things just became possible, though.

If you're less than on fire about APIs and their potential - check out our post called APIs and Developer Platforms, A Discussion of the Pros and Cons - and know that 16 of the 18 authorities quoted in that post were interviewed entirely through a 3rd party Twitter client using that API.

If you're a Twitter user you know how essential to Twitter that company's API has become, an estimated 80% or more of Twitter use comes in through the API and the constellation of 3rd party services that leverage it. The FriendFeed API may be the most eagerly awaited since Twitter's.

This Aint Just RSS Readin'

Casual users should take note that FriendFeed is far more than just an RSS aggregator. Check out the podcast and transcript of our interview with the company's founders in early February for details. See also my recent interview with RSS keystone Dave Winer, where we discussed FriendFeed more than anything else. You'd have seen it already if you were my friend on FriendFeed.

Commenting, feed and item display, liked-by-a-friend item exposure and a smooth friend recommendation path are some of the key differentiators of FriendFeed. In February at least, only 70% of the feeds coming into FF were RSS feeds, too. The rest are from other kinds of 3rd party APIs that the FriendFeed team has tied into by hand. There are many different Lifestreaming apps, but FriendFeed has a lot of momentum, a good user experience, renders well on mobile and has caught peoples' imaginations. It's also got some heavyweight backers.

The Possibilities

Some of the examples from the FriendFeed announcement are these:
"[The API is] designed to make it possible for anyone to improve FriendFeed or integrate FriendFeed into other applications. You can develop a FriendFeed interface for a mobile phone, build a FriendFeed widget for your blog, or develop an application that makes it easy to post photos to your feed from your iPhone."

I'm cheering for an Adobe AIR desktop interface, APML import/export and some sophisticated item-level recommendations. How about a FriendFeed/Imeem mashup? I'd love to listen to a streaming radio station of all the music that my FriendFeed friends favorite on their respective music networks. Oh the possibilities are many. This is a very exciting announcement.

Web developer and active FriendFeed user Hao Chen has created a FriendFeed profile greasemonkey script that will import a user's Twitter profile and display it on FriendFeed.This script will only work if the user has his or her Twitter stream being imported into FriendFeed.

Extended Twitter Profile

While the simple profile that Twitter offers may suffice for some, sometimes you just want more. In comes the Extended Twitter Profile background. Released by Fabrice Epelboin, this is a Photoshop .PSD file that you can customize by adding more images, web addresses, and general information. Once you're done with editing the .PSD, simply save your file as a .jpeg or .png image file and upload it as your Twitter background.

Making Twitter and FriendFeed Better Places

These extensions are a great addition to both communities and good for promoting your site and more. Now you can finally figure out who the guy who keeps requesting you on FriendFeed really is. On the same note, you can finally promote other communities and sites on Twitter without spamming your followers. If you're using the Extended Twitter Profile background, leave a link to your Twitter profile in the comments section and show us what you've done.

Can't FriendFeed find a way to save their information-addled users by providing real-time updates without hitting refresh every five seconds? Yes, they can. And it turns out that, not only is this new feature good for you, it's good for FriendFeed, too.

But what does FriendFeed's technological experimentation mean to you? Real-time FriendFeed updates. Without having to hit refresh.

Here's an example of the updates in action:

And I have to admit, it's a whole new way to consume FriendFeed. It's not only fast, it's addictive. But don't take my word for it. Head on over to the 2008 Debates room and see it in action for yourself. (It should get even more interesting once the debates are broadcast in the US, tonight.)

How does FriendFeed accomplish this addictive feature? They're experimenting with a technique called "long polling." In FriendFeed's words that means that their server "doesn't respond to your browser's request until there's something it wants to send."

There's an upside for the users and an upside for FriendFeed, as well, since they can now "show your FriendFeed faster using far fewer requests than before."

And fewer requests are good for everyone.

While the feature is only in testing, it's clear to see how this type of long polling could be applied to other services - and to our information consumption on the Web. For a medium that has long been about active engagement, technology is rapidly pushing it into something more passively consumed. Watching - and I literally mean "watching" - the impact of that change occur will be interesting indeed.

The most important changes to the interface are connected with the new ability to group your friends into different lists. While most of the navigational elements of the regular version were on the top of the page, the new beta moves all of these elements to the right.

Adding friends to these lists is done through a nifty text interface that auto-completes names as you type them. Of course, if you can't remember the names, you can also add friends through the subscription sub-menu (see screenshot).

Overall, these lists are a very nice feature that will make using FriendFeed a lot easier in the future, as it will allow you to create specialized feeds with relatively little noise. This way, for example, you can group political bloggers into one list and tech bloggers into another, while updates from your close friends can go into yet another list.

Home Feeds and Comments With Date Stamp

One other nice new features is that you can now see the actual home feeds of other users. This is a great way of discovering new people to follow.

Another good addition to FriendFeed's feature set is that it now displays how long ago a comment was made when you hover your mouse over the little bubble next to every comment. Before, it was impossible to tell when a comment was made.

Posting

Posting directly to FriendFeed has now become a bit easier and the old "Share Something" button has been replaced with a text box at the top of the page (though interestingly, as you search, this box turns into a search box, which is a bit confusing). One nice new feature is that you can now directly upload pictures to FriendFeed. While we really like universal uploaders like Pixelpipe here, sometimes you might just want to send a picture to FriendFeed. This has been possible every since FriendFeed acquired mail2ff.com, but this new posting UI makes it quite a bit easier.

Still Some Unfinished Business

As much as we like the new interface for how it makes dealing with a lot of friends easier, there are still a few areas where FriendFeed could improve. In this new version, for example, the FriendFeed rooms you subscribe to are always visible, but searching for interesting rooms is still not possible.

FriendFeed also still has to figure out a way to deal with duplicate entries, as many users tend to share the same link over and over again, even though a discussion has already formed around the link somewhere else on the site.

Becoming the Default

As FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor told us, the plan is to make this beta interface the primary FriendFeed interface after gathering more feedback from users and tweaking it accordingly. We think that this new interface is a great step forward for FriendFeed and we would assume that most users will switch over to the new interface long before it becomes the default.

FriendFeed, the service that allows people to aggregate their activities across the social web, is a great place to find what sorts of things people are talking about and what they are saying. In some ways, FriendFeed is better for "real-time" web searches than Twitter because a FriendFeed search will not only return Twitter posts, but will also include shared RSS feeds, Facebook status updates, items posted natively in FriendFeed itself, stories being promoted on social news web sites like Digg.com, and much more. However, unlike Twitter, FriendFeed's user population is smaller and tends to consist of people who are more technology-focused, so the results will be somewhat skewed in that direction.

Although useful, searching FriendFeed today still leaves a lot to be desired. That's where FriendDeck can help. After authenticating with your FriendFeed username and remote key, you can kick off searches from the box at the top of the FriendDeck window. Each search term will then display in its own column within FriendDeck. The end result is a web app that very much resembles the TweetDeck's desktop application, which also lets you display search terms in columns. However, unlike FriendDeck, TweetDeck additionally lets you organize your Twitter friends into groups in order to follow and track different sets of users along with your search queries.

What FriendDeck Won't Do

Unfortunately, FriendDeck only allows for monitoring searches, not groups. Perhaps because FriendFeed already includes a "lists" feature, FriendDeck's creator didn't think to add the ability to simultaneously track different groups of people. That's disappointing to say the least, since tracking lists (groups) on FriendFeed means having to constantly switch between them to see the latest news from each group. What we wouldn't give for a TweetDeck-inspired FriendFeed app that let us track lists, rooms, and search terms like this!

That said, there are still a couple of tricks you can do with FriendDeck in order to see more than just traditional searches. You can also:

• See a user's likes - type in the query likes:{username} (Ex: likes:sarahintampa)
• See a user's comments - type in the query comments:{username}
• See a user's friends - type in the query friends:{username}
• A list of posts relating to a URL - type in the query url:{url.com}
• A list of posts about a domain - type in the query domain:{domain}

Although those custom queries are certainly handy, we would love to see FriendDeck do more. If you also have suggestions for what you would like to see in FriendDeck, you can join their FriendFeed room (http://friendfeed.com/rooms/frienddeck) or you can email the developer Paul Kinlan at paul@frienddeck.com.