While many people use FriendFeed to share and discover interesting stuff from around the web, we have grander ambitions. Leveraging our past experience building massive, distributed systems like Gmail and Google Maps, we have built the most scalable platform for Festivus grievance-airing in existence — capable of airing over 20 million grievances per second.
We are excited today to introduce this product to the world, albeit in limited beta:
We will be rolling out the product in stages, with an API coming next week. If you want to bring grievances to your users, you can easily and seamlessly use our JSON or Atom Publishing Protocol APIs to take advantage of our proprietary AirGrievance™ technology in your own product.
If you have any problems using the platform, please air your grievances on FestivusFeed.
FriendFeed is getting ready for the holidays! We have lights, stockings, the traditional Yule Log DVD and presents 'neath the tree.
The only thing that's missing is the Festivus Pole. I am off to procure one this evening. It needs to be made from aluminum, for its "very high strength-to-weight ratio." Stay tuned for more details on how "the rest of us" celebrate the holidays...
You can now edit and delete your comments, which was by far the most requested feature from our active users. We also made the maximum comment length much longer based on all of your feedback. Let us know if you have any problems with the features, and keep the feedback coming!
We've just added Gmail/Google Talk to our list of services. So now when you change your status message, it'll show up in your feed. Finally, there's a way for people to comment on each others' inscrutable status messages.
To use this feature, just go to your Settings page and add Gmail/Google Talk. You'll receive a chat request from friendfeed@talk.friendfeed.com in your chat interface. Click "Yes" and your current status message should show up on your feed almost instantly. Changes to status messages also show up pretty much instantly.
Late last week, we pushed out a number of nice changes to FriendFeed along with a major upgrade to our infrastructure. Among the changes:
- New user interface for items in your feed. All of the links on your FriendFeed are now left-aligned on the page, and you can expand "clusters" of items with a single click. This makes your FriendFeed a lot easier to scan quickly, and you can read every single one of your friend's 20,000 Twitters per hour without leaving FriendFeed.
- Multiple accounts for each service. If you have multiple blogs or multiple del.icio.us accounts, you can now include them all in your feed.
- Better Atom feeds. Our Atom feed now contains all comments, likes, and thumbnails, as well as detailed Media RSS tags so you can get as good of FriendFeed experience in your feed reader as you do on FriendFeed.com.
- Better blog widget. Our blog widget now has comments and likes as well. (Check out Paul's blog widget on his blog.)
- Faster, faster, faster. When you add a new service to your feed, that service will show up in your feed immediately, and we fetch new items from each service even faster than before.
We also added support for Pandora, which a number of FriendFeeders have already noticed. We appreciate all your feedback, and we have a bunch of great features coming in the next month!
FriendFeed will be down for maintenance for an hour or so tonight as we upgrade our service. We will try to keep it as short as possible, and we appreciate your patience!
We finally found workarounds for the issues FriendFeeders were having with del.icio.us. Del.icio.us bookmarks are back in FriendFeed, and we are actively following the del.icio.us update stream, so your new bookmarks should appear on FriendFeed within a few minutes of your adding them.
We also started monitoring pinging services for a number of other services, which means that you will receive updates from Twitter and blogs much faster than before. If you would like to ensure that your blog posts appear in FriendFeed as quickly as possible, just check that your blogging software is configured to ping the Google Ping Service or Weblogs.com. Many blogging services, such as Blogger, do this by default, so FriendFeed may already be receiving your pings.
If your blog isn't pinging any of these services, don't worry, we'll still find your new blog posts as before.
For more information about pinging, check out http://www.google.com/help/blogsearch/about_pinging.html.
My IM status messages usually change every 10 minutes... fluctuating between frustrated rants, inside conversations with my best friend, an actual status message like "watching football," and interesting articles I've happened upon that I want my friends to see.
This last part is a pain. It’s sort of silly that I have to cut and paste a URL into my status message just so my friends can see the Onion article that just made me laugh out loud (and there’s no good way at all to do this with pictures).
Well, today, we launched the FriendFeed bookmarklet, a really quick and easy way to share web pages with my friends. Anytime I'm on a website that I want to share, I just click on the "Share on FriendFeed" button. I can edit the title and even add images without leaving that web page — and it gets published automatically to my FriendFeed.
We wanted to give users a simple way to post things directly to FriendFeed, in addition to showing the stuff they publish on sites like del.icio.us, Digg and Google Reader. We hope people like it. I know I'm excited that it’s finally launched! While we were testing it internally, I only had Bret, Jim, Paul and Sanjeev to share my “Sports Guy” articles with, and frankly, none of them cared about the Patriots.
A lot of our users have told us that they wish they could get FriendFeed updates via email. So, we're pretty excited to add this as a new feature. As of today, you can get your feed in your inbox, either daily or weekly. Now you can keep up with your FriendFeed activity, even if you forget to check the website. We include your entire feed in the email (all your friends' entries, comments, and "likes").
Here is a screenshot within Gmail:
You can set up your email preferences in your FriendFeed settings.
We have tested it in Gmail, Outlook, and all the major web email clients, but please let us know if you have any problems using the feature. Keep the feedback coming!
By popular demand, we added support for Upcoming and Ma.gnolia. Let us know if you have any problems adding the services to your FriendFeed.
Happy Halloween! We are really excited to have our first holiday logo on FriendFeed today:
Thanks to Julie Zhuo for creating it — we are really fortunate to know such a talented artist. A higher resolution version is avaialable as well.
People use FriendFeed to socialize and comment on the stuff they share from sites around the Web (like YouTube, Google Reader, or Last.fm), and a lot of our users said they wanted an ultra-quick way to share their appreciation for the most funny/interesting/useful entries from their friends. Now you can tell your friends which entries you like with a single click:
Let us know what you think!
We just added our first new employee last week, Ana Yang, whose official title is "Chief Miscellaneous Officer." Ana is going to be doing a combination of finance, business development, HR, and Jelly Belly purchasing for us.
Before FriendFeed, Ana was traveling the world on a year's vacation. She was in China when she realized that working with us would be even more fun than cavorting with pandas. So she bagged the rest of the trip and came back early. Before the trip, Ana worked at Google, on marketing for Gmail.
We are really excited to have her! (Although we were sort of hoping she would bring the panda back with her...)
We have been a bit distracted this past week because we have been moving into our new office. We got a great deal on the space (actually, we got the best deal in the history of real estate), so we ended up with a lot more space than we actually need:
Now that we have moved in, and I finally got the espresso machine working, we are back to working full steam on features and letting more users into FriendFeed. Many FriendFeeders noticed that we added support for Vimeo last week, and we pushed out a number of improvements to friend/subscription navigation today. We have a handful of exciting things coming this week, so please keep the feedback coming.
A number of FriendFeeders complained that Last.fm was showing up too often in their feeds because we tracked every song you listened to. We updated our service so that we will only publish the songs you explicitly marked as "loved" in Last.fm. We hope this will make the Last.fm entries more useful and a bit less frequent.
It has been quite a week for us at FriendFeed. We launched a private beta version of our site to a handful of people on Monday, and we got a bunch of great press about the launch. Our ambitious beta testers have been using the site intensively, reporting tons of bugs and requesting tons of features in our discussion group. We really appreciate all of your feedback on the site, and we especially appreciate the thoughtful and detailed bug reports. Future FriendFeed users will thank you!
Last week we mainly focused on fixing technical issues people had connecting to services. We also made it easy to turn off emails from the site (100 "so-and-so subscribed to your FriendFeed" emails was a little much for some people), and we fixed a number of bugs in our Facebook application.
This week, we are focused on fixing the long list of bugs we didn't get to last week and letting in a large percentage of the people who have signed up on our waiting list. If you signed up for the site last week, you will probably get an invitation by Wednesday or so.
Our initial users were self-selected "early adopters," with a disproportionate number of Google employees due to our previous jobs. We were very curious what the most popular services would be at launch, and we were surprised to see Flickr take the top spot among our initial group of beta testers:
Being the top service doesn't mean you show up more in FriendFeed. It turns out Twitterers like to Twitter faster than Flickr users can produce photos. Here is the breakdown of events recorded into FriendFeed in the first week:
Twitter users have generated an astonishing 18.7 messages per user relative to 5.4 photos per Flickr user. We are looking forward to see how this distribution changes as we broaden our user base.
We will be posting updates to the blog regularly as we add features and fix bugs. You can subscribe to our blog via our feed or via email.
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