FriendFeed.append("Tudor Bosman")

We're incredibly fortunate to have Tudor Bosman join FriendFeed as our seventh employee. If you use Gmail or any service backed by Oracle, you've already relied on his code.

Tudor is one of the best hackers I have ever worked with, in the most positive sense of the term. In particular, he's one of a rare breed of engineer who really understands how to design reliable, scalable systems.

One challenge facing large websites is data center failure. For you non-engineers out there, this is what data center failure looks like:

When he was working on Gmail, Tudor implemented a novel replication scheme that enabled us to handle data center failures without skipping a beat, reducing downtime by an order of magnitude. For you non-engineers, here is another illustration:

For his next act, Tudor is going to help make FriendFeed better. (In fact, he already started, fixing a bug and launching his fix his first day on the job. He already understands our code better than we do, as far as I can tell.)

Traffic to FriendFeed has been growing steadily, and we need to improve scalability while preserving flexibility so we can continue launching features quickly. I am extremely excited to be working with Tudor again, and can't think of a better person for the job.

Small features and bug fixes

We had a "fix-it day" yesterday at FriendFeed, where we fixed bugs and added small features that we have been putting off for too long. New features include:

• Mini-profiles - hover over someone's name on any page to see the services they're subscribed to and a snapshot of their recent activity.
  
• Flickr favorites - we now pull in your Flickr favorites in addition to the photos you publish on Flickr.
• Nickname editing - you can now edit your FriendFeed nickname in your account settings so you can change the URL of your FriendFeed more easily.

We also fixed a number of bugs, including improving our Netvibes support and fixing a number of iGoogle authentication issues.

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to report their issues to us in the FriendFeed discussion group.

Mixx and Netvibes added to FriendFeed

We just added support for Mixx and Netvibes. Add them to your FriendFeed in your service settings.

Seesmic videos now play inline as well.

Have a great weekend!

FriendFeed API: Extend and improve FriendFeed

We are very excited to announce the launch of the FriendFeed API, which enables developers to interact with the FriendFeed site programmatically. It's 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.

If you are a developer, you can get started immediately at the FriendFeed API documentaion. We have also released Python and PHP client libraries to make it easier to get up and running.

If you are a non-techie, you can learn more about what the API does and how you will interact with third party FriendFeed applications by reading the FriendFeed API user FAQ.

Since the API is new, it is a work in progress, and we expect to make a number of changes in the next few months. Developers can send us feedback in the FriendFeed developer forum.

We would like to thank the folks who took the time to send us feedback on earlier versions of the API, particularly Benjamin Golub, DeWitt Clinton, Eran Hammer-Lahav, and Dave Winer. We haven't yet implemented all of their suggestions (OAuth is coming!), but we wanted to get it out to all of you for feedback in the meantime.

We are eager to see all the innovative applications people will create with the API. Happy coding!

Post your FriendFeed comments back to Twitter

For you Twitter users: When you are commenting on a Twitter post in FriendFeed, you now have the option of sending your comment as an @reply in Twitter as well:

Happy Tweeting!

FriendFeed Fix-it Day #1: Bug fixes and new services

We had a "Fix-it Day" at FriendFeed on Friday, which means we spent all our time on the top bugs and feature requests from our discussion group. You can now add these web sites to your FriendFeed:

• Disqus
• Goodreads
• LibraryThing
• Seesmic
• SlideShare

See the complete list of services at the top of your FriendFeed home page.

We also fixed a bunch of bugs, including:

• When deleting a photo entry, the entire entry is now deleted instead of just one of the photos. (original thread)
• The FriendFeed embed widget now has square corners to work around the background color issues people were having.
• Comment links in our emails and Atom feeds now link a permalink that won't go stale (original thread)
• "Unsubscribe" links now only appear in the public feed when you are actually subscribed to the person
• We increased the paging limit so you can now page past the 11th page of your feed.

Thanks for the continued bug reports and feedback! You can chat with us and other FriendFeed users in the FriendFeed discussion group.

FriendFeed has search

I am extremely happy to announce that FriendFeed now has search. There is now a search box on the top right of your FriendFeed home page. You can search over all of your friends' shared items, an individual person's items, or search all of FriendFeed:

You can also restrict your search to any one of the web sites FriendFeed supports. For example, here is a search for "friendfeed" in your friends' Twitter messages. While some of the sites we support at FriendFeed have search functionality available, many of them do not, and most do not allow you to restrict your searches to content from your friend network. Our hope is that this new FriendFeed feature will make all the products we support a bit more useful for you.

Search boxes are now available on most pages of the site. If you want to see all of the search options available, check out the advanced search page.

All of the effort for this feature came from Jim Norris, one of the FriendFeed co-founders and one of the smartest guys I know. Since I have have been bugging him about this feature for weeks, he is officially my superhero now. Jim, you rock.