FriendFeed now supports multiple author blogs

If you write for a blog with multiple authors, you can now exclude posts written by other authors, so only your posts will show up in your FriendFeed. To use this feature, visit your service settings page, and you will see a "This blog has multiple authors" checkbox in your blog settings.

Thanks to Philipp Lenssen for continuously reminding us to implement this feature :)

FriendFeed options - hide Twitters, mute discussions, and more

Does one of your friends Twitter way too often? Is the long discussion about bacon-flavored cookies getting old? Now you can easily hide individual services from people you are subscribed to, mute individual discussions, and a whole lot more by clicking the "Options" link under an entry in your feed:

We give you a few hide options, so you can, for example, hide someone's Flickr photos until they get commented on or liked, at which point it will re-appear in your feed. In our internal testing, this feature has been an effective way of letting just the "good stuff" through.

Once you set rules to hide some of your friends' activity, you will see a "Show hidden entries" link at the bottom of your feed every time FriendFeed suppresses entries. You can see all the stuff you have hidden (and modify your options) by clicking this link.

Let us know what you think!

Shareaholic now supports FriendFeed

Shareaholic, a Firefox extension that lets you submit pages to a variety of social news and bookmarking services, now supports FriendFeed. To add FriendFeed to your Shareaholic button, click on "Preferences" and check the FriendFeed checkbox. Thanks to Jay Meattle for taking the time to implement the change!

See popular items from your friends-of-friends

Many users have asked that we make it easy for them to see the entries their friends have commented on and "liked." As of today, you will start seeing your friends' comments and "likes" in your own feed.

For example, Paul commented on Fred Wilson's blog post, and I am subscribed to Paul, so now the blog post shows up in my FriendFeed as well:

We highlight your friends' comments within the discussion to make it more obvious why the entry is showing up in your feed.

To maintain privacy, we only apply this "friends-of-friends" view to entries that are public, i.e., the originator of the entry has a public FriendFeed. If your feed is private, your entries and the discussions around those entries will continue to be visible only to those people you explicitly approve. We also don't broadcast the entry past friends-of-friends, no matter how many people comment on it — so if a friend-of-friend comments on your entry, it won't become visible to their friends as well.

We are eagerly looking for feedback on this feature. Our goal is to make the most interesting shared items more prominent so your FriendFeed has a higher percentage of interesting stuff and active discussions. We are pushing this feature out for feedback because it seemed to do a good job at that in our internal testing. You can leave feedback in the comments on this post, or contact us in the FriendFeed discussion group.

Another new FriendFeeder!

There are a handful of websites that I leave open in my browser all of the time: FriendFeed, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader. These sites all have something in common -- something we're really excited about. But before I explain the connection, I'd like to recount some history about when I was working on Gmail at Google.

What most people don't know about Gmail, is that Google worked on it for a very long time before releasing it to the world. In fact, we created at least seven distinct versions of the Gmail user interface before the product was ever released. During that time, we experimented with a lot of different interfaces and features, including much of what you see on Gmail today (and some things that never made it into the final product). However, the product never felt "ready" -- the features were there, but they were a little awkward and didn't fit together quite right. Finally, in the later part of 2003, someone new joined the team, a user experience designer named Kevin Fox. Over the course of the next several months, Kevin and the team developed a new Gmail interface (code named "fin"), and finally the features all fit together! That was the interface that we launched with, and to a large extent that is the same interface that Gmail has today (though there have been many improvements). So I'm very grateful to Kevin, because if he hadn't joined the team, Gmail may have never launched.

Eventually, Google brought several other highly talented designers onto the Gmail team, and Kevin was able to move on to other new products. His next big project was Google Calendar, and after that he went to work on the Google Reader 2.0 interface. So the connection among Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and FriendFeed is, as of today, Kevin Fox.

FriendFeed is already one of my favorite products, but we're not finished yet -- in fact, we're just getting started. We have a lot of big hopes and ideas for FriendFeed, but one of the most difficult aspects of any product is integrating all of your ideas into something simple, cohesive, and broadly appealing. That requires a talent that not many people have. Fortunately Kevin does, and we're thrilled to have him join us here at FriendFeed.