- monthly subscription or
- one time payment
- cancelable any time
"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
When we launched FriendFeed themes we mentioned some improvements we wanted to make, and here they are!
Choose how people see your FriendFeed profile
Starting today, people who visit your profile will see it in the theme you've chosen. If you'd prefer visitors not to see your theme, you can turn it off on your settings page. You can also choose themes for the groups that you're an admin for (looks like the So You Think You Can Dance admin wasted no time!).
If you'd rather not see other people's profiles, you can make that selection in your settings page.
Create your own themes
Of course, we know a lot of users were looking for even more ways to express themselves, so we've added an option that lets you create a custom theme by uploading a background image and choosing a few colors. We want to add more options in the future, but hopefully, this will give you some ideas for where to get started.
As always, let us know of any problems in the feedback group and show us your stuff in the themes group.
We are happy to announce that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle...
The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We've always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook's passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.
What does this mean for my FriendFeed account?
FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally. We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.
What about the FriendFeed API?
The FriendFeed API will also continue to operate normally. As above, we will let you know as we settle on our plan to more fully integrate with Facebook.
Check out the official press release for more information.
Two weeks ago, we launched version 2 of the FriendFeed API in beta. Since then, we've watched how developers have been using the API and collected a lot of their feedback. We've implemented some changes, and now, we're ready to remove the beta label!
In addition to removing the beta label, we also added support for using OAuth in applications installed on a user's desktop or device. The way it works is similar to Google's ClientLogin for Installed Applications; read all about it in our API documentation.
During the beta period, a number of developers took advantage of the new API to develop nifty applications. Some of the ones we found most interesting include:
And more are on the way! If you have feedback or thoughts on our API, let us know in the FriendFeed API group and be sure to join the developer mailing list.
We're very excited to have Ben Darnell joining the FriendFeed team starting today! Not only is Ben our newest employee, he's our first new employee in over a year!
I had the honor of working with Ben on the Google Reader team and I'm thrilled to have him bring his ninja-fu data-storage and scalability skills to FriendFeed.
Of course, now that we've hit 13 employees we're beginning to face the inevitable 'big company' problems. With the addition of Ben Darnell to the team already populated with the illustrious Ben Golub, we've now encountered the 'Two-Bens' conundrum.
Welcome, Ben Darnell, to the FriendFeed Family!
As a devoted FriendFeed user, I have tried to convince all of my friends and family to join the site, but a handful of them never quite got their accounts set up properly. With our new Recommend friends feature, I can fix their FriendFeed experience by recommending subscriptions to them.
Visit http://friendfeed.com/friends/recommend, and you can recommend subscriptions to any of your friends. I found out my dad wasn't subscribed to a number of our family members, so I sent him ten recommendations:
When you send friend recommendations, your friend will get an email with all of your recommendations, including a link to subscribe to all your recommendations with a single click. (This is the best part for me — it lets me do all the work for my dad, and he just needs to click a single link to get his account in good shape).
You will also find "Recommend friends" links in the popup bubbles that appear when you hover over someone's name:
And you will see them on profile pages of your friends who joined the site recently:
You can currently only recommend friends to people who are also subscribed back to you. Let us know what you think in the FriendFeed Feedback group.
Today we are launching version 2 of the FriendFeed API for beta testing. We focused on making the API simpler to use, and we added number of compelling new features:
Documentation is available at http://friendfeed.com/api/documentation. A Python library that implements the new API methods and OAuth support is available at http://friendfeed-api.googlecode.com/files/friendfeed-api-v2-beta1.tar.gz.
You can play with a sample application that uses OAuth and the new API methods at http://friendfeed-api.appspot.com/. The complete source code for the sample application is available at http://code.google.com/p/friendfeed-api-example/.
Send us your feedback in the FriendFeed API v2 group. We are looking forward to using your new apps!
Variety is the spice of life, and we know you like some spice when you 'feed, so we cooked up a few more themes to please your palette.
Grasslands gives a breath of country air to the FriendFeed experience and, if higher altitudes are your fancy, we've got Orion (thanks for the pic, NASA!) Knot brings a little bit of elegant decoration, and be sure to grab your goggles and brandy snifter to enjoy Steampunk!
By popular demand, we bring you the Duck Hunt theme, in which you shoot cartoon ducks while you peruse FriendFeed.
Make sure you have your sound on.
If you want duck carnage on your own site, check out Duck my life.
Last week, we had our second-annual summer offsite. Mini-golf was played.
Kevin won with only 45 strokes! (Bret came in second at just one stroke behind.) Paul came in highest with 76 (are high scores in golf bad?).
Then we moved on to Paul's house, where Parties that Cook! had staged an elaborate kitchen challenge.
Divided into two teams, we had an hour to create a meal using pork, potatoes and summer corn and peppers. Bret, Sanjeev, Kevin, Casey, Tudor and Gary created this masterpiece (with only a little help from the sous chef):
But our team (Paul, Ana, Karen, Rachel, Jeanette and Ross) ultimately won it with recipes that relied heavily on tequila:
It was another successful summer offsite for FriendFeed's friends and family!
(Ben and Megen cooked remotely :)
One of the coolest things about FriendFeed is how you can see everything that's happening on the site in real-time. Starting today, this is even more true with real-time search.
Just enter a search query as you always have, and see new results instantly stream in at the top of your screen in real-time. No need to constantly click refresh. It's an extremely useful (not to mention mesmerizing) way to immediately see what people are saying about a particular topic. You can search across just your friends or all of FriendFeed, including imported services like blogs and Twitter accounts.
So try it for yourself. See what people are talking about today. Or what they have to say about Obama. While we were testing this internally, we could barely keep up with the non-stop activity regarding Michael Jackson. (That's when we knew we needed a pause button.)
Searches using advanced search options and saved searches are also in real-time. And now you can embed a real-time search in your blog or web page, like this:
We're also working on allowing you to subscribe to saved searches, add them to your friend lists, and even get notifications based on search keywords. So stay tuned.
In the meantime, we hope this will make your searching experience feel a lot more like the rest of FriendFeed. As always, let us know your thoughts in FriendFeed Feedback.
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.
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.
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!
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):
Interested in building a new application or connecting your existing one to FriendFeed? Learn more about the FriendFeed API.
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!
FriendFeed is now available in Persian (فارسی)! You can change your FriendFeed language preference in your account settings.
Thanks again to all of our Persian users — it has been extremely exciting for us to see FriendFeed so widely used around the world.
This is the first right-to-left language we support, so expect that there will be some bugs. You can report problems and discuss FriendFeed with other Persian users in the FriendFeed Feedback (فارسی) room.
You might have noticed that FriendFeed looks pretty different today. We've just launched a whole new design, and a host of features and improvements that comes along with it.
We unveiled this look three weeks ago in beta and have been busy gathering feedback and making improvements. Here are some of the things you'll now find in FriendFeed:
Forget the refresh button. All pages now update in real-time. You'll see your friends' photos and messages stream in as they're shared. Comments and likes also get displayed as they happen.
You can now choose whom to share items with. Post something to multiple feeds or to just a few friends. You can also now direct message anyone who's subscribed to you.
Use FriendFeed's advanced search options to create filters for easy access to the friends and topics you care most about. Choose from filtering options such as seeing only entries that have certain keywords or entries with a certain number of likes or comments.
And of course, we had to add something new to the beta... and so we're introducing FriendFeed by email!
Post new items to your FriendFeed by emailing share@friendfeed.com. You can post to groups by emailing groupname@friendfeed.com, and you can direct message your friends by emailing username@friendfeed.com.
You can also choose to get your FriendFeed posts and comments delivered directly to your email inbox (see your email preferences), and even comment on entries simply by replying to messages.
While we've been testing this new feature, we've used FriendFeed groups to completely replace all our internal mailing lists. And we've loved it! It's been easier to share screenshots and links, and we've loved being able to post and respond to all entries from the comfort of our email inboxes. Try it for yourself instead of a mailing list.
As you spend time on the new FriendFeed, you'll notice other new things, such as:
You might also want to check out our updated FAQ for things that have changed, such as groups. If you find a bug, let us know. And of course, we're still working on new features and improvements to this interface. As always, let us know your thoughts and comments in FriendFeed Feedback.
"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
"Basically the price of a night on the town!"
"I'd love to help kickstart continued development! And 0 EUR/month really does make fiscal sense too... maybe I'll even get a shirt?" (there will be limited edition shirts for two and other goodies for each supporter as soon as we sold the 200)