More media amongst the messages

If you've seen an extra play button or two around FriendFeed recently, no need to call your Internet tube man, those are just MP3s from media enclosures that are now showing up in FriendFeed:

Any feed that contains audio, like a feed for a podcast, can now be played directly from Friendfeed.

Likewise, small photo previews will now show up in feeds with Media RSS thumbnails that are small enough.

With all these new shiny things, soon FriendFeed won't require any more of this labor-intensive "reading" at all. Let us know what you think in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

FriendFeed iPhone interface

We just launched a specialized iPhone interface for FriendFeed. When you visit friendfeed.com in your iPhone browser, you will get the new interface automatically:

For all of you without iPhones, you can check out the site at http://friendfeed.com/i.

The FriendFeed iPhone interface looks a lot like the standard FriendFeed interface, but the font sizes, graphics, and forms have been tweaked to make it easier to use on the iPhone.

If you decide you want the standard FriendFeed interface on your iPhone, you can get to it by clicking the "Normal (non-iPhone) interface" link at the bottom of any page. Your preference will be saved, so it's easy to stick with the old interface if you choose to.

We are eager to hear what you think. Let us know in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

Welcome Gary Burd to FriendFeed

We're really excited to welcome our newest FriendFeeder, Gary Burd. FriendFeed users may know Gary from his popular application Mail2FF, which lets you email photos to your FriendFeed using the FriendFeed API.

We know Gary from Google, and I had the pleasure of sharing an office with him in Kirkland when we worked on the Google Talk launch in 2005 (my favorite part was the gangsta rap we'd play late at night).

Before Google, Gary worked on some extremely influential projects at Microsoft, including developing the Trident HTML rendering engine, the core rendering component of Internet Explorer 4. Trident raised the bar for HTML rendering by introducing a programmable DOM, the core of DHTML and modern dynamic web applications like Gmail, Google Maps, and FriendFeed.

We're all extremely honored to have him on board. Welcome, Gary!

Ross's FriendFeed Tutorial #2: Email Pictures To FriendFeed Using Mail2FF

Since we launched our API, avid FriendFeed users and developers have built all sorts of cool applications. One of our favorites is Mail2FF, which lets you easily post pictures to FriendFeed via email. Built by Gary Burd, it lets you post messages directly to FriendFeed using a special email address that consists of your FriendFeed nickname and your FriendFeed Remote Key. (Your remote key is a secret combination of words and numbers that allows third party software to interact with FriendFeed on your behalf, without the need to reveal your real password.)

For example, to post photos to my feed, I just attach them in an email to ross+remotekey@mail2ff.com.

Check out my full video tutorial on Mail2FF below.

Intern Goutham in his new office space

Meet Goutham, who's just finished his first day interning at FriendFeed. He's joining us after completing his first year of graduate school at UC Irvine in computer science, where he's working on a project to recognize human actions in video by probabilistic models from video training data. Over the summer, he'll be lending his CS skills to help create and develop many features in FriendFeed.

Before UC Irvine, Goutham completed his bachelor's degree at UMass in computer science. One of his great ambitions is to make and star in a shot-for-shot remake of Office Space, one of his favorite movies. Sadly, his experience working at FriendFeed will be nothing like working at Initech.

Spice up your room with feeds

Rooms have become incredibly popular since we launched the feature a few weeks ago. Based on your feedback, room administrators can now import sites directly into a room:

To see it in action, check out the Obamamania room, which Ana connected to the official Obama accounts on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and more.

So go ahead: pull in some photos to your family room, create a snarky side-channel for your local newspaper, or bring all your favorite celebrity blogs together in one place for easier fawning.

Now that we have room service, we hope you'll enjoy your stay at FriendFeed even more.

Another FriendFeed Fix-it Day

We had a big Fix-it Day here at FriendFeed, where we stop working on our bigger projects to fix the bugs and add the small features that have been lingering for too long. Here's a few of the things we fixed:

• We added support for five more services. You can now add Intense Debate, brightkite.com, Diigo, Mister Wong, and tipjoy to your feed.
• We completely revamped our feeds, so FriendFeed should work a lot better in feed readers. The titles and links are now useful, and the bodies contain permalinks to the entry so it is easier to get to the live discussion on friendfeed.com.
• Comments from people you are subscribed to are lightly highlighted so it is easier to scan for comments from people you know in active threads.
• We fixed Atom feeds for private rooms.
• We fixed a number of bugs with Google Talk support. If you had trouble adding your Google Talk account to FriendFeed, try again.
• When you send a Twitter from a FriendFeed comment, we suppress the Twitter entry from your FriendFeed home page so you don't see as many duplicates.
• When you go to Advanced Search from the search page, your search query is pre-populated into the form.

We really appreciate all the feedback we have been getting in the FriendFeed Feedback room. Keep it coming!

Ross's FriendFeed Tutorial #1: Using FriendFeed's "Hide" features

Our intern Ross is producing a series of tutorial videos about FriendFeed. The first RossCast is about FriendFeed's "hide" features, which make your FriendFeed home page more manageable by automatically hiding unwanted entries:

We will be publishing tutorials weekly. If you have ideas for videos, let Ross know in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

FriendFeed adds personalized recommendations

I was just on a two-week vacation in Peru, and when I got back, there was so much stuff in my FriendFeed that I couldn't sort through it all. I just wanted to see the most interesting stuff I'd missed.

That's why I'm happy to announce we just launched a feature that helps you find the best stuff your friends have shared recently without sifting through your entire feed. Underneath the search box on your FriendFeed homepage, you now have links to see the "best of" FriendFeed from the past day, week, or month according to the people you're subscribed to.

The results are entirely personalized to you. We figure out what content was most interesting in your network based on your friends' comments and "likes" and other signals.

If you only have a couple of minutes to check FriendFeed, and you only want to see the most interesting entries, check out the best of the past day instead of your main feed.

The feature is a work in progress, so we're eager to hear your feedback in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

New features for your FriendFeed rooms

We've added a third type of room: semi-public. Anyone can view or comment on entries in a semi-public room, but only administrators can post new entries. This makes it easier to keep large rooms on-topic.

Rooms can now have multiple administrators as well:

And room administrators all have the ability to delete any entry or comment in the room:

The best and brightest interns

In the words of Michael Scott, we decided we wanted to "youthanize this place" and hired ourselves some interns. Two of our three full-time summer interns are already here!

Meet Ross, FriendFeed user support and videographer extraordinare. Ross is in between his junior and senior years at Chico State (and despite how cliche this sounds, he also makes really good lattes). Look for some of his video productions on a FriendFeed near you.

Re-meet Dan, our hibernating winter intern whom we didn't get around to introducing until his last day. Dan is on his summer break between years at business school at MIT and will be helping us with projects ranging from recruiting to product design.

Ross and Dan will also have to fight among themselves for who gets stuck writing the welcome blog post for our other intern, who's starting in two weeks...