FriendFeed Blog: December 2008

Happy holidays from FriendFeed!

The FriendFeed crew is enjoying another great Festivus season, and we wanted to wish you all happy holidays.

Thanks to Kevin for creating another awesome holiday logo...

Last Fix-it Day of 2008

On Friday we had our last "fix-it day" of the year. We spent the day working on small bugs and features to improve your overall FriendFeed experience. You can now:

Edit entry titles and links on entries you've already posted — just look under the More menu on any entry you've posted and select "Edit this entry"

Share a YouTube video that starts at any point during the video — skip right to the interesting part of a video and get the conversations going quicker. Just append "#t=[time]" at the end of the video's URL (e.g.—#t=45s, #t=1m30s). See an example here.
Include your Instant Queue movies from Netflix
Hide individual Custom RSS/Atom feeds
Rename imaginary friends

Also, private room descriptions are now only visible to room members and we display a "This entry has been deleted" message when people link to a deleted entry. Let us know about any bugs you find with our Report a bug tool. If you have any other feedback, share it in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

Simple Update Protocol: Update

Several months back, we announced SUP (Simple Update Protocol), a proposal for making RSS and Atom feed updates faster and more efficient. Since then, a number of services have added SUP support, we've SUP-enabled our feed fetcher, and there are now thousands of SUP enabled feeds being imported into FriendFeed. Among the services that now support SUP are Disqus, Brightkite, Identi.ca (and other Laconica-powered micro-blogs), BackType, and 12seconds.tv. Whenever one of these feeds is updated, the new entry appears on FriendFeed within seconds (non-SUP feeds typically take 15-30 minutes to update). Check out the public feed of Brightkite updates to see this in action.

We've also added several additional tools and resources to simplify SUP development:

Frequently Asked Questions about SUP
A SUP validator (source)
An RSS/Atom Feed tester, which checks your SUP links and also shows how your feeds will be rendered on FriendFeed.
A Public SUP feed, that anyone can link to and contribute updates. This is ideal for small publishers and individual blogs.
Open source implementations of SUP are available as part of Laconica and Benjamin Golub's open-source blog software, as well as the example code provided by FriendFeed.

You can read more details about SUP and check out sample code on Google Code and discuss the proposal in the SUP FriendFeed room.

FriendFeed now in Deutsch, Français, Español, 日本語, русский язык, and 简体中文!

Sprechen sie Deutsch? 你想用中文版的FriendFeed么? ¿Quieres compartir enlaces con tus amigos?

We thought so! That’s why we’re so excited to add six new language interfaces to our site. As of today, you can now select from English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and simplified Chinese from a dropdown at the bottom of every page or from your Account settings page.

These languages are some of the most popular ones we've seen on FriendFeed so far, but we’re just getting started. We’ve got plans for adding more languages and we’re continually working to improve the FriendFeed experience for our users worldwide, including adding popular international sites such as 百度空间, はてな and menéame.

Each language interface has its own user-supported help area, but you can always let us know your thoughts and suggestions in the FriendFeed Feedback room — our site is global, but unfortunately for now, the eleven of us are mostly English-readers. :(

But we’ve all been testing and using our site in these different languages, so who knows... maybe one day we’ll actually parler Français! In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the new interfaces!

New features and services courtesy of Fix-it Friday

Another Friday, another "fix-it day"! Now you'll see:

Improved Tumblr support – images, audio, and most videos from your Tumblr feed will now automatically show up in your FriendFeed
Links to a user's comments and likes by clicking on the stats in their mini-profile (which appear when you hover over a user's name)
A Custom RSS/Atom feed service. You can still import any RSS/Atom feed by adding it as a "Blog", but this new option gives you a couple of additional customizations. This works particularly well if you want to import a feed from a bookmarking or microblogging service, since you can post each entry as a message (with no link) or pull in a description, which gets posted as the entry's first comment.

And in case you haven't seen our "Add services" page lately, check it out. We've just increased it by 22.92%. In other words, we've just added 11 new services!

Celebrating the holidays a little early

For the first time in FriendFeed history, all 11 FriendFeeders found themselves in the same room (and the universe did not explode). In honor of having Ben and Gary in town at the same time, we had our holiday dinner a little early this year.

Kevin and Rachel were gracious enough to offer up their home for our annual feeding of friends, and Rachel even cooked the entire friendFEAST herself!

For dessert, I contributed the only thing I know how to make--panna cotta--and everyone still lived to tell the tale.

We can't believe that we've more than doubled in size from this time a year ago. Thanks for another great year! Happy holidays (a little early) from the entire FriendFeed team!