FriendFeed now 6x more awesomer with themes

Individual expression is the heart of FriendFeed, and today we're excited to launch FriendFeed themes, with six new designs to choose from.

One of the first things you learn conducting usability studies is that a participant will always say 'I don't like the colors'. Designing for a broad user base usually means finding the best middle ground you can, while still retaining the site's core personality. Through rigorous internal testing ("Looks good? Looks good!"), we've come up with several designs that let you add a little more individuality to FriendFeed's UI, making your experience better without distracting from the task at hand.

We started off with 'Fresh', a refresh of the original classic theme, and then jumped to some more interesting designs. These six new themes (and Classic) are just the start though. We've got more themes in the pipeline and will be releasing them a few at a time.

If you'd like to discuss themes and keep up with new themes as they come out, the FriendFeed Themes group is the place.

Now we know there are going to be two big questions out there and so we'll answer them straight away:

Can I choose how my profile or group page looks to other people? At the moment, selecting a theme will change how FriendFeed looks to you, and other people looking at your profile page will see it in whatever theme they've chosen. We know how important it is to be able to customize how your profile page or group page looks to the outside world, and while that isn't part of today's release, it's on the roadmap.

Can I make my own theme? This is also on the roadmap. It would be easy to just let you upload a background picture and pick a few colors, but we want to give you the flexibility to make more nuanced themes than this would allow, while still making sure that your theme will be compatible with enhancements that we'll make to FriendFeed down the line ("Looks good? Looks good!").

For today, we're happy to give the FriendFeed UI a breath of fresh air, and we hope you enjoy your new themes! Click in 'settings' to see your current theme, and try something new.

You can now share files on FriendFeed

One of my favorite things about FriendFeed is how quick and easy it is to upload and post a photo. Now, we’ve added the capability to share files as well. You can easily attach any file, such as a PDF or a spreadsheet, to your FriendFeed post.

To share files on friendfeed.com, simply click the "Files" link underneath the post box and select which files you want to include. You can also share files by including them as attachments on emails sent to share@friendfeed.com. (Learn more about posting via email.)

This has been an especially popular request from organizations and companies that collaborate using FriendFeed groups. We’ve certainly been using this feature internally and have found it extremely useful. We hope it’ll help make you and your collaborators even more productive, and a little more attached to FriendFeed.

Have questions or feedback? Please let us know in FriendFeed Feedback.

Subscribers count!

We're happy to announce that we've recently started sharing FriendFeed subscriber counts when we crawl for the latest version of your blog's feed.

So if you have 200 people subscribed to you on FriendFeed, and you've added your blog as a service on FriendFeed, now you can see those subscribers right alongside the subscriber counts from Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo, and anyone else subscribed to your blog's feed.

When you add your blog as a service on FriendFeed, you're putting your words in front of a lot more people. But how many? Well, for me, it's:

Keep in mind though, that even though this is the number of people who are subscribed to you, the number of people who actually see your posts within FriendFeed can be substantially higher, because whenever one of your subscribers 'likes' or comments on one of your items, that item gets shared with their friends as well!

Popular iPhone apps for FriendFeed

Some third party software developers have made good use of the FriendFeed API to create some great FriendFeed iPhone applications. Stay connected to FriendFeed even when you're away from your computer with one of these iPhone apps (at our office, BuddyFeed and Amigo have been really popular):

• BuddyFeed (iTunes page)
• amigo (iTunes page)
• Nambu (iTunes page)
• AlertThingy (iTunes page)
• webfeedr (iTunes page)
• Motherfeed (iTunes page)

Interested in building a new application or connecting your existing one to FriendFeed? Learn more about the FriendFeed API.

Welcome back, Ross!

We are so excited to have our intern Ross back with us! Ross is behind some of FriendFeed's best moments captured on film: helpful tutorials, "The FriendFeed Whiteboard", and of course, the infamous piñata cam.

Ross will be spending the summer developing more videos, helping our users in the feedback rooms, and working to grow the FriendFeed community. His first task... organize the FriendFeed summer offsite!

We couldn't be more excited to have Ross here. I proclaim this: The Summer of Ross!