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.
I like it, I like it
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!
Our newest FriendFeeder: Ana Yang
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...)
FriendFeed Global International World Headquarters
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.
Last.fm Loved Songs
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.
FriendFeed's First Week
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.