A fresher, more delicious FriendFeed

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 new status message: I love the FriendFeed bookmarklet!

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.

Get your FriendFeed via email

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!

New Services: Upcoming and Ma.gnolia

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.