Tag: FriendFeed

Two days ago Louis Gray pointed out on FriendFeed that when a new user signs up for FriendFeed that they receive 24 suggested FriendFeed users to follow. I’m one of those 24. There is no mystery to how these 24 users are selected for promotion on the FriendFeed platform, they are simply the 24 FriendFeed users with the most followers.

Once a user subscribes to someone this list changes. it roughly becomes the most popular people followed by their friend(s).

And while Friendfeed’s objective and simplified method of promoting users to new sign ups is probably better than Twitter’s much criticized subjective method of elite favoritism, it could be vastly improved yet.

1. The most popular users are not necessarily the people that will provide a new FriendFeed user the best new experience. When I look at who (in addition to myself) the other 23 default suggested FriendFeed users are I’m struck that a number of them, while very active in tech and the blogosphere, are very inactive on FriendFeed. More than simply a feed reader, FriendFeed is a community. You get the most out of it when you participate. Yes, popular users may provide interesting content, but they might also provide zero engagement and interaction.

I would propose a new main recommended user page that combines both a users number of followers (i.e. popularity rating) and their total number of comments/likes (i.e. activity rating) and averaging the two. By averaging these two elements to provide default recommendations this would provide new users both with users who the community feels provide valuable content, but also users who are engaged. Of course users who are popular and engaged would be promoted the most of all. Averaging these two numbers seems like pretty basic math that any computer algorithm ought to be able to do.

2. One of the problems with ranking users based on a combined popularity/activity rating is that this system precludes new users from gaining recognition and new followers. Because of this I think that this same criteria should be applied to users who have been registered on the site for less than 60 days. A special tab on the recommendation page should be for newer users where existing users could regularly go to find the most active/popular new users to welcome them to the site and see what they are up to.

3. Why limit the list to 24? It would seem to me it would be pretty simple to page the list of recommended users so that users could go beyond the first 24 recommended. By letting me page the recommended users list, FriendFeed would help me find more of my friends and users I might be interested in while providing more than 24 users exposure. If FriendFeed can’t page this list for some reason, I still think that they’d be better off taking say the top 200 ranked users (not just the top 24) and then randomizing them as suggested users.

4. Geography sometimes matters. I’ve long (well long in internet years) believed that FriendFeed needs a profile page. While on the last build they gave us a short space to post a sentence or two about ourself, there still is no way for me to indicate to FriendFeed where I live/work geographically. If FriendFeed allowed their users to voluntarily input their city, state, country, zip code, etc., they could then have a tab on the suggested users page showing users within 100 miles of me.

5. Interests sometimes matter. I’m very interested in finding people on FriendFeed who are photographers and love photography. FriendFeed should allow users to submit interests (sort of like wefollow) and then apply the same popularity/activity rating to a list of things you are interested in. Are there popular friendfeed users who are interested in photography and neon signs and graffiti and art and San Francisco? Then I want to subscribe to them. Right now it’s harder to find these people. By providing interest lists I could find even more people to follow.

So that’s pretty much it. I believe the system above would be a vastly superior recommendation system for Friendfeed (for Twitter as well but I’m not sure they are really paying attention).

By the way, I do think it is *fantastic* that FriendFeed now also lets you scour your gmail/yahoo/hotmail mail and Twitter/Facebook friends to find users on the site that are your email and social network contacts. But my number one feature request for FriendFeed right now is that they give us this same functionality for Flickr. I would think that with the Flickr API, who my contacts at Flickr are would be pretty easy to sniff out. Matching my Flickr contacts up with FriendFeed accounts would vastly improve my already great Flickr/FriendFeed combo experience.

If you are reading this on Flickr by the way. Please sign up for FriendFeed. It’s a much superior way to browse your contacts’ flickrstreams. See more here. If you are a Flickr contact of mine and are already on FriendFeed and I’m not following you, please leave a comment here with your FriendFeed page so that I can add you. You can follow me on FriendFeed here.

[Note: This news was embargoed until 9:00 a.m. this morning, but TechCrunch broke the embargo.]

At 9 a.m. this morning, FriendFeed launched a new user interface at beta.friendfeed.com. The new beta site will run in parallel with the current version of FriendFeed at friendfeed.com at least for a while.

The biggest difference between the old version of FriendFeed and the new version is the introduction of live scrolling updates. I had early access to the new beta site over the weekend and spent some time playing around with it.

Here are my initial thoughts.

1. Live Updating. I tried playing around with this and have mixed feelings about it. Sometimes I really like it. It feels more intuitive and interactive. Other times it’s harder to put into words why I don’t feel like I like it, but the word that keeps popping into my head is seasickness. A lot of the problem here is that I’m following a ton of people (over 6,000) and so the user interface just scrolls too fast some of the time. Too fast for me to read on my main FriendFeed page. It feels chaotic and I can’t keep up. I found that late at night it is slower and more manageable but during prime time it was too fast.

Fortunately for me (and others) there is a pause button which allows you to turn this feature off and manually refresh the page like you did with the old version. Live updating works much better on my smaller lists. I’m sure there are some that will really digg this new feature though, especially since most people are not trying to follow over 6,000 like I am. I’m interested in hearing Robert Scoble’s observations about this feature as well as he follows even more people than I do. This new feature is turned on by default.

I suspect that most of the time I’ll have live updating turned on but that during especially busy times I’ll turn it off.

2. A new design and interface with much more emphasis on your avatar. I have to say I love the new UI. I think the new UI looks much cleaner — beautiful looking with easy on the eyes rounded corners and the what not. I’m assuming Kevin Fox deserves some of the kudos for this new design, but whoever worked on it, hats off to you.

I think one of the things that hurt the old version of FriendFeed was that it just felt too complicated and even a bit clunky. Even though I never thought it was too complicated for me, I heard that complaint from people a lot. All of the little service icons could be intimidating.

Now FriendFeed has dropped the service icons and focused much more on the individual user avatar. It feels a bit more like Twitter now in that regard. I actually like this and think that it will make FriendFeed much less intimidating to people. I also suspect that females with attractive avatars are likely to see a significant spike in followers on this new version. 😉

3. Direct messaging comes to FriendFeed. With this new user interface, FriendFeed has now introduced direct messaging. This small but super powerful new feature is much bigger than I think people will realize at first. I think FriendFeed direct messaging could eventually replace a lot of my email personally. Some of the people behind GMail are on the FriendFeed team so I expect good things from their direct messaging service. It’s nice how FriendFeed shows you a little number next to your Direct Mail menu, much nicer than “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” But the real power of direct messaging in Friendfeed is that it really incorporates a whole new way to communicate via email. It’s far more collaborative with the live updating.

One of the things I hate about email is that once I send a message it’s gone. Frequently I’ll send an email and then realize I made a typo or misspoke or wish I could in some way edit it. With FriendFeed you can. You just go back into the message and change whatever you meant to say. Because all of the messages are grouped together it’s much easier to follow and track conversations directly than traditional email.

Direct messaging on FriendFeed almost feels more like a chat/mail hybrid than anything. I found that just using this new service for one day that it was one of the stickier things I’ve seen on FriendFeed. I’ve seen very little spam on FriendFeed so far and FriendFeed’s direct messaging feels a lot more fun than regular old email.

4. Filters. Filters rock. One of the most exciting ways to use FriendFeed is to filter interesting ways to view all of the vast repository of information and data it has become. One of my favorite filters is scanning FriendFeed for entries with the word “photography” in them with five likes or more. I’ve found some super interesting photographers and photography related stuff on the internet that way.

In the past I actually just made a bookmark for this and would go to the bookmark myself. It’s nice to have it built right into my main FriendFeed Interface. It will be interesting to see the FriendFeed community builid and share custom filters over time. I suspect that there are many hidden gems out there that we don’t even know about yet. But in the meantime, check out a few of these filters that I’ve already created for myself personally: all Flickr posts, all Zooomr posts, all posts on FriendFeed with 5 likes or more, all Flickr posts with 5 likes or more, posts mentioning the word neon with 1 like or more. These are just a few examples. The sky’s the limit here really. If you’ve got some great filters yourself please leave them in the comments.

5. Profiles. Although they are very rudimentary, FriendFeed has now added the ability for you to add a description to your profile page. I’ve been a big proponent of profiles coming to FriendFeed for a while. Initially I was a bit disappointed with the profile description because earlier yesterday in the beta it was limited to 50 characters. I set my original profile description as “I hate 50 character limit profiles.” But then after I direct messaged Bret Taylor, one of the FriendFeed Founders, about this, Bret extended the character limit and so now I’m able to fit the same tagline that I’m using on Twiter: “Quiet Observer of Modern Nihilism with Box that Captures Light.” Thanks to Bret and the team for giving us a little bit more room for our profile descriptions.

I do think it would be interesting to see FriendFeed add a city or zipcode field in the profile info as well that could then be used to create a list of suggested users in your geographic area.

Overall I’m very happy with the new FriendFeed. I think it represents a simpler more elegantly designed user interface and a huge step forward for the service and for the company. I think this new interface will give FriendFeed much more mainstream appeal and really shows that FriendFeed is the clear leader in the microblogging and lifestreaming space right now.

If you would like to follow me on the new FriendFeed beta you can do that here.

Update, Other blogs and news sites on FriendFeeds Redesign:

1. Official FriendFeed blog post on the new redesign here.
2. Robert Scoble: Tips for Real Time Web working on new friendfeed.
3. Charles Hudson: The New FriendFeed UI – More About Content, Less About Sources
4. Mashable: The New FriendFeed Looks A Lot Like Twitter
5. TechCrunch: New FriendFeed: Simpler, Faster, Better (Maybe Too Fast)
6. CNET: FriendFeed’s redesign makes entire site real-time
7. Venturebeat: FriendFeed’s redesign combines publishing and IM better than Facebook or Twitter
8. The Inquisitor: New FriendFeed Beta: What’s Different
9. Hutch Carpenter: FriendFeed’s New Beta: Taking Realtime Aim at Facebook
10. Financial Times: Real-time web is for real on FriendFeed
11. Louis Gray: FriendFeed Reloads With Real-Time At Its Core

Update #2: Significant conversations about the new FriendFeed beta happening on FriendFeed

1. Bret Taylor: A new design for FriendFeed.

2. RAPatton: you can make your imaginary friends visible to others on FF now; if I only could do that as a child.

3. Jeremiah Owyang: What’s the difference between Friendfeed and Facebook? List them out below

4. Steve Rubel: Wondering if the new Friendfeed update has gone too far. Is it too fast for y’all? It’s almost like having one cup of coffee too many!

5. Susan Beebe: FriendFeed new UI is amazing! So glad I have a fresh POT of coffee here on my desk! wooo hoooo! 🙂

6. Steve Rubel: Friendfeed now tells you how often someone posts too if you are not subscribed to him/her.

7. Robert Scoble: I love it. Everyone is complaining that friendfeed is going too fast. Welcome to my world! Now, learn to use lists!

8. Mashable: The New FriendFeed Looks A Lot Like Twitter

9. Alex Scoble: Is it just me or does friendfeed look a lot more like Twitter now?

10. Shey: Being subbed to 950+ people and dozens of rooms finally comes back to bite me

11. AJ Batac: Cleaner FriendFeed (New Beta) – 04/06/09 | userstyles.org

12. Shey: Will the new FF beta increase interaction? Or will it die down with the buzz?

13. Shey: One thing I’ve noticed — the app icons are gone from posts. No more “discrimination” against Non-FF posts.

14. MG Siegler: i, for one, freaking love the new FF live speed. why slow down information? speed up your intake.

15. Bwana: Filters are awesome. Will be using them often.

16. Robert Scoble: The ones who complain the most about friendfeed beta are the ones who follow the most. Me? I just ride the wave and use the features. 🙂

Update #3: The new FriendFeed User Interface will be discussed on the Gillmor Gang this afternoon at 4pm.

Update #4: Robert Scoble has part one of four a video series of the FriendFeed new beta briefing here.

What does this photo of Robert Scoble have to do wth the new FriendFeed UI? Well, not much, but they do have a pair of Hulk gloves at the FriendFeed office and since I didn’t have any photo manipulations of Scoble as the Hulk already, I thought now was as good a time as any to make one.

Earlier this evening FriendFeed gathered a small group of journalists, bloggers and users at their headquarters in Mountain View, California to demo a new beta user interface that they plan on releasing very shortly. The details of the new user interface are still private with an embargo on the news. According to FriendFeed Co-founder Bret Taylor, the embargo is put in place to make sure that when people write reviews about the new interface that it will coincide with the actual launch of the beta enabling FriendFeed users to try the new site out for themselves.

I’ve been a big fan of FriendFeed for the past six months or so. I’ve been a pretty heavy user and at least for me FriendFeed has replaced both my former RSS Reader, as well as Twitter for the most part. I’m also finding that I’m browsing a large chunk of my Flickr views through FriendFeed as well.

Specifically with regards to photography I’ve found FriendFeed amazing. I’m consistently finding really great photography related content to blog from FriendFeed as well as am seeing some of the best new work on the web today. If you’d like to check out some of FriendFeed’s photography I’d recommend this filter of posts mentioning photography with 5 or more likes. You also might be interested in the previous article I’ve written on how to use FriendFeed with Flickr here.

This was my first trip to their Mountain View offices and when I arrived I was surprised at how small their offices and staff are. Presently the FriendFeed team consists of 11 employees, most coming from Google. It was nice finally being able to put names and faces together.

As part of my visit I was able to take quite a few photographs of both the FriendFeed staff, their offices and some of the other press/bloggers being briefed on the upcoming launch. If you’d like to see my photos from yesterday’s briefing you can click through here.

I can’t really get into details about what is in the new release, but at least at first glance I liked it alot. I’ll be writing a more formal review on the new release once the embargo is lifted.

If you haven’t signed up for FriendFeed yet you definitely should. If you’d like to follow me on FriendFeed you can find me here.

I haven’t blogged a post specifically about FriendFeed recently, even though it is probably the number one place where I spend time on the web these days, and thought I’d take a moment to put together a quick list of 10 reasons why you should sign up for FriendFeed.

Many of you are already on FriendFeed, but I’m surprised that so many of my photography friends especially still have not signed up for the service yet. Why do I want you to sign up for FriendFeed? Because I want to make sure that I’m seeing all of your great photographs, blog posts, tweets, etc.

On with the list.

1. Because it’s easy to sign up for FriendFeed and even if you don’t use the service, signing up for it allows your work better exposure on one of the fastest growing communities on the web. Signing up for FriendFeed takes less than 5 minutes and very quickly you can link your Flickrstream, Zooomrstream, Facebook account, Twitter account, blog, etc. and have all of this information aggregated for your friends in one place.

Even if *you* don’t use FriendFeed, building a FriendFeed profile allows other people who do the ability to see your stuff. I used to go to Flickr/Zooomr etc. to see my friends/contacts/etc. photos. Now I browse them through FriendFeed. If you are not on FriendFeed, there is a good chance that I and lots of others are not seeing your work. Even if FriendFeed is not for you, sign up for it any way so that people can see your stuff.

2. Because by signing up for FriendFeed, your work will get better exposure across the internet. FriendFeed was built by a bunch of ex-Google guys — some of the very early Google guys. These guys know how Google works. They know how to make sure that FriendFeed content is indexed for search engines.

When you search for "Thomas Hawk" on the Googler what comes up? My blog, my flickr account and then my FriendFeed account. My FriendFeed account is indexed above my Zooomr account, my digg account, my Twitter account, my Facebook profile, Linked In, etc. It’s ahead of everything except my blog and Flickr. Same goes for individual posts that I have linked at FriendFeed. By having a FriendFeed account you make sure that your content is better indexed into search engines.

3. Because FriendFeed is a superior platform for monitoring your Flickr and Zooomr contact photos. When you watch your friends/contacts photos on FriendFeed instead of Flickr/Zooomr you see *all* of the photos that they upload, not just the last five. You can also create custom lists. You can, for instance, create a list of only your friends who are neon photographers, or graffiti photographs, or San Francisco photographers, or… well you get the idea. You can customize your friends/contacts into more categories letting you better watch their photography by your own custom photography channels.

What’s more, FriendFeed not only includes all of your contacts photos in their photostream, it also includes their faves as well. Over the past six months, some of the best photography I’ve seen has come from other photos that my friends are faving. Your friends have great taste. This is a better way to monitor both their photography and the photography that they love and like.

4. Because FriendFeed is going to be big and when you sign up for it 6 months from now or a year from now you might not be able to get the domain there you want.

Remember when gmail first came out (hint, some of the guys that built Gmail for Google are behind FriendFeed). And remember when everybody rushed there to get the best email address. I sure wish I would have. Because then I might have been able to get thomashawk(at)gmail.com. Instead, by the time I got around to signing up for gmail, thomashawk(at)gmail.com was already taken — so now I’ve got the pain in the ass gmail address of thomashawk22(at)gmail.com. I wish I had signed up for gmail earlier and secured my email address. Fortunately I signed up for both Twitter and FriendFeed early and was able to secure both http://twitter.com/thomashawk at Twitter and http://friendfeed.com/thomashawk at FriendFeed.

Even if you don’t want to use FriendFeed today, you might want to in the future and you’ll be happy you got your custom url. Since signing up for FriendFeed is free and easy, at a bare minimum you should try to secure the best domain name you can for yourself there here and now today.

5. Because if you like Twitter, you’ll love FriendFeed. With FriendFeed you can follow your Twitter Friends and even filter to only see your Twitter friends if you want. What’s more if your friends have a particular good tweet, it will get promoted to the top of your screen. If you are tired of seeing a Twitter you can hide it. Earlier this week FriendFeed even built a tool that will automatically import all of your Twitter friends directly into your FriendFeed account. Using the FriendFeed settings you can also have your FriendFeed posts automatically post back to your Twitter account.

Earlier last week when Apple announced that Steve Jobs was stepping down for medical leave, I was one of the first people on the internet to post this on Twitter. But guess what, I didn’t post it on Twitter at all. I posted it on FriendFeed and instantaneously it was posted to my Twitter account. Look at the time stamps on both posts, 1:37pm, the exact same.

6. Because FriendFeed is a *kick ass* search engine. Want to see a bunch of interesting articles about photography? Just search for "photography" on FriendFeed. What a great bunch of interesting stories and articles on photography. Try a search on anything else that you’re interested in. Apple, Microsoft, Obama, TiVo, whatever. Search is really good on FriendFeed today (remember it was built by ex-Google guys).

But search is going to get even better down the road at FriendFeed. Social Search is the future of search and being able to filter your search results by your friends/family as well as community consensus using "best of day" sort of features will make FriendFeed one of the best search engines on the internet. More and more I’m finding great stories to blog about using search on FriendFeed.

7. Because you can hide anything that you don’t want to see on the site. Have you ever been on a site and wished that you didn’t have to see a thread anymore. I know in some Flickr Groups there are threads that I wish I could hide. Especially threads that get bumped over and over and over again. If I don’t care about the latest debate, or the latest silly thread I have to just keep ignoring it. Not at FriendFeed. A simple hide will ensure that you never see that thread again. You can not only hide individual threads, you can hide threads by person, by source, etc.

A lot of people that are not used to FriendFeed tell me that they like it but that it’s too noisy or busy. That they see too much stuff that they don’t want to see. Learn to manage this by hiding content. Very quickly you’ll have a stream customized exactly to what you want to see.

8. Because FriendFeed lets you get rid of your RSS reader. Are you using an RSS reader? Is it clogged full of uninteresting content? At FriendFeed the most liked/commented/interesting stories get bumped to the top. If you follow a feed by someone who is not on FriendFeed yet? No problem. Just make an "imaginary" friend for them and you’ll see that stuff too.

Having your RSS feed filtered by human editors makes for a far more interesting experience. I abandoned my Google Reader account about 8 months ago and haven’t looked back since.

I think FriendFeed still needs to build a tool to let you import your OPML file directly into FriendFeed and match it up with existing accounts and imaginary friends to make this even better, but at least for me FriendFeed has completely replaced my RSS reader and I consistently get to read and consume better and more interesting content filtered by my social network.

9. Because the site is technically excellent, very rarely has downtime and loads very fast. There’s something about a fast loading consistent site that I love. I’ve clicked on FriendFeed pages tens of thousands of times and have rarely had any trouble at all. I find the site technically to be faster and more consistent than Flickr, or Twitter, or really any of the other sites where I spend a fair amount of time.

10. Because there is a *great* community of interesting people on FriendFeed. Community on any social network is important. And FriendFeed has one of the best communities around. I’m not going to name names, but there are so many interesting people doing interesting things on FriendFeed engaging in conversations every day. Jump right in and get to know them. They are a friendly and welcoming bunch… well, for the most part. They are funny, interesting, unique people. Sometimes conversations can get heated. Sometimes people say things that they shouldn’t have. But I find it always engaging. The developers behind the site are also very active in the community.

So there you go. I want to see your work on FriendFeed. If you sign up to FriendFeed, or if you’re already on FriendFeed and I’m not already following you, your photos, etc. there, please leave me a comment on this post with your FriendFeed link so that I can add you as a contact there. If you want to add me as a contact on FriendFeed you can do that here.