Air your grievances on FestivusFeed

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.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

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...

Edit and delete your comments

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!

Gmail and Google Talk status messages in FriendFeed

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.

Eight gabillion improvements launched

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!

Upgrading servers this evening

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!