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.

7 comments:

axemclion said...

Are you guys planning to write crawlers for all interesting sites ? May be u guys can open up an API for sites to post updates. Or even simpler, have a service that shows RSS feeds....

- Parashuram
http://dy-verse.blogspot.com

Jesse Hattabaugh said...

So is this essentially the same as del.icio.us, and every other site that gives you a bookmarklet so that you can post content to it, or does it do something different?

axemclion said...

THis is like the ability to post "activities" from different sites. For eg..From world of warcraft, a detail of my duels, from orkut, scraps written to me, etc. Writing a crawler for all sites is gonna be tough. So if there is a way to post to friendfeed using an RSS or something, I have have these sites as services.

Tanya said...

Hey, great feature. I really like FriendFeed. I have it up on my blog. I don't know if anyone else would be into this idea or if it's even possible, but here it is: For the Netflix Feed, I think it would be better if it showed when a new movie arrived at someone's home rather than when a new movie was added to the queue. I have a 100+ movies in my queue. Adding one doesn't mean I'll be watching it anytime soon. I think it'd be more social too. If a friend wanted to see a movie I had at home, they could drop me an email.

Oh, and I also think it'd be cool if you guys came up with different sizes for the feed to embed in websites. I've been thinking about moving mine to my About page because it takes up so much space. Maybe you could create one that only shows the 3 most recent things or even the 1 most recent thing.

FatallyHip said...

I really like this feature too. BTW, I'm getting more and more addicted to Friendfeed every day. :)
http://friendfeed.com/fatallyhip

moonboy said...

Hi, just to report a little bug: using Opera, it is not possible to select an image by clicking on it (it does not stay selected).
Appart from that, great feature!

App said...

You should implement the changes to the bookmarklet script that a friend of mine added, to make the form movable. Sometimes the current official one covers images on a page and you can't select them to include them in a posting.

More info and link to the edited script, here: http://friendfeed.com/e/571c8337-deb9-4887-b2ae-9315b3001f30/Beta-hack-FF-bookmarklet-replacement-js-with-drag/

I have been having to host it myself and I don't mind letting other people use it, but it would be better from a security standpoint if it were hosted by FF, instead.

Also, more people would get to use the new feature, too.