FriendFeed API: Extend and improve FriendFeed

We are very excited to announce the launch of the FriendFeed API, which enables developers to interact with the FriendFeed site programmatically. It's designed to make it possible for anyone to improve FriendFeed or integrate FriendFeed into other applications. You can develop a FriendFeed interface for a mobile phone, build a FriendFeed widget for your blog, or develop an application that makes it easy to post photos to your feed from your iPhone.

If you are a developer, you can get started immediately at the FriendFeed API documentaion. We have also released Python and PHP client libraries to make it easier to get up and running.

If you are a non-techie, you can learn more about what the API does and how you will interact with third party FriendFeed applications by reading the FriendFeed API user FAQ.

Since the API is new, it is a work in progress, and we expect to make a number of changes in the next few months. Developers can send us feedback in the FriendFeed developer forum.

We would like to thank the folks who took the time to send us feedback on earlier versions of the API, particularly Benjamin Golub, DeWitt Clinton, Eran Hammer-Lahav, and Dave Winer. We haven't yet implemented all of their suggestions (OAuth is coming!), but we wanted to get it out to all of you for feedback in the meantime.

We are eager to see all the innovative applications people will create with the API. Happy coding!

Post your FriendFeed comments back to Twitter

For you Twitter users: When you are commenting on a Twitter post in FriendFeed, you now have the option of sending your comment as an @reply in Twitter as well:

Happy Tweeting!

FriendFeed Fix-it Day #1: Bug fixes and new services

We had a "Fix-it Day" at FriendFeed on Friday, which means we spent all our time on the top bugs and feature requests from our discussion group. You can now add these web sites to your FriendFeed:

• Disqus
• Goodreads
• LibraryThing
• Seesmic
• SlideShare

See the complete list of services at the top of your FriendFeed home page.

We also fixed a bunch of bugs, including:

• When deleting a photo entry, the entire entry is now deleted instead of just one of the photos. (original thread)
• The FriendFeed embed widget now has square corners to work around the background color issues people were having.
• Comment links in our emails and Atom feeds now link a permalink that won't go stale (original thread)
• "Unsubscribe" links now only appear in the public feed when you are actually subscribed to the person
• We increased the paging limit so you can now page past the 11th page of your feed.

Thanks for the continued bug reports and feedback! You can chat with us and other FriendFeed users in the FriendFeed discussion group.

FriendFeed has search

I am extremely happy to announce that FriendFeed now has search. There is now a search box on the top right of your FriendFeed home page. You can search over all of your friends' shared items, an individual person's items, or search all of FriendFeed:

You can also restrict your search to any one of the web sites FriendFeed supports. For example, here is a search for "friendfeed" in your friends' Twitter messages. While some of the sites we support at FriendFeed have search functionality available, many of them do not, and most do not allow you to restrict your searches to content from your friend network. Our hope is that this new FriendFeed feature will make all the products we support a bit more useful for you.

Search boxes are now available on most pages of the site. If you want to see all of the search options available, check out the advanced search page.

All of the effort for this feature came from Jim Norris, one of the FriendFeed co-founders and one of the smartest guys I know. Since I have have been bugging him about this feature for weeks, he is officially my superhero now. Jim, you rock.

See the stuff your friends commented on and liked

You can now get a feed of entries you commented on or "liked." The feed is really useful to get a glimpse of what you or one of your friends have found particularly interesting lately. Check out my comments/likes feed.

You can find these feeds and comment/like stats on the right hand side of profile pages (like http://friendfeed.com/bret):

People can only see your comments/likes feed if your feed is public or if they are already subscribed to your feed.

FriendFeed is now a lot faster

We just launched a change that makes your FriendFeed home page load 3 - 8 times faster, and most people's FriendFeed pages now load in less than 50 milliseconds. This change will be particularly noticeable for people with a lot of subscriptions (yes, we were thinking you, Robert).

We appreciate all the feedback we have gotten on the product since launch. This change lays the foundation for a lot of features and bug fixes to come over the next few weeks. Keep the feedback coming!