Mathew's Thoughts and Such

New Friendfeed UI Screencap from Mathew Ballard on Vimeo

Today, around 11:30 AM EST Friendfeed opened up its new beta UI to the public. And boy did people go crazy over it, both those that liked it and those that seem to hate it. I personally really like it and think that the people behind Friendfeed have done a great job in moving the social site to a better direction. Now, I’m not going to go over all the changes that have been made, as those of you who are reading this have already read up on all the newness to Friendfeed, if you haven’t you can read up on it at Techcrunch.

The purpose of this particular blog is just to give my thoughts on what I like about the new Friendfeed and the things that I would liked to either see changed or improved. Now, one does need to remember that this is all in BETA, which means that things will continue to change and improve. And who knows, by time I finish this post all my suggestions and wants may be taken care of…but that is highly unlikely.

Anyways, on with the my thoughts on everything. First the five things that I really like about the new Friendfeed:

1. The Real Time Feed. Yes, I like the RTF. Why? Because it has made me more active and it actually gets me to see more then I would have before. When the RTF came about months ago I didn’t like it and never really used it. But, it has been improved greatly this time with post sliding around as they get comments and new ones falling in every once in a while. You can even pause the feed for as long as you want with a simple press of a button.
2. The Look. The new look is very simple yet pops more then the original.

1. Direct Messaging. You can now Direct Message other users that you are following. It is very simple to do and you can even do so without having to go to the persons page. And all conversations are kept in one single thread. Kinda of like Wall to Wall on Facebook.
2. The Ease of Posting. It has been made easier to post items to a feed now. You can select multiple feeds to post to, upload multiple photos at one time much faster and you can select which times get pushed to your Twitter feed, if you do that sort of thing.

There are many other new features to the new Friendfeed beta, these are just the ones that I like the most.

Now, for the fun part. The part where I complain about the things that I don’t like about the new Friendfeed. Actually, in all seriousness most of these are just improvements that I would like to see to the current features implemented into the beta.

1. More Control Over the Real Time Feed. Although I do like the RTF much more this time around, I do think that the user needs to be able to control it more. Being able to control how often new content is updated would be a big plus for me.
2. The New Subscriptions Box. So far the new subscriptions box shows all the rooms and users together. No longer are users and rooms separate and they are in order of your activity with that room or user. I really would rather have the older system of having users and rooms separated and having them in the order of which the have updated.
3. New “Friends” Section. In the current Friendfeed you can select all your friends and then send them invites like that or just select a group of friends and move them to a list. But, now (as far as I can tell thus far) you can’t do any of that anymore and those task have been made harder and longer then they need to be.
4. No Stats. Currently there are no stats to view other then how many likes and comments you have total on Friendfeed. You can’t even see the amount of Likes or comments in the past week.
5. The Filtering System. The filtering system has been updated, slightly. You can make filters out of searches and even create filters with just people’s likes. But, you still can’t just make a filter for one service. At least not without jumping through dozens of hoops to do so. I still want what I discussed in my previous post.

1. Customizable Backgrounds. Yes, I want to be able to change the background of Friendfeed without having to use a 3rd party browser plug-in. I would at least like to change the color from the current gray to something else.
2. Services, Services, Services. So many things with the services have been changed. No longer is there a little icon telling you want service a post came from. And when you go to a person profile you can’t see all the services they are bringing into their feed with out clicking through their profile. Also, when you click on the service icon on their profile you it takes you directly to that site instead of just showing all the items in their feed. This I would like to see changed back to the non-beta system at least.

Before I go I do want to say one last thing in response that many people have been saying today about the new Friendfeed beta, “Just because it does something similar to Twitter doesn’t make it Twitter like. Seriously people! You can’t comment on twitter items, you can’t like twitter items, you can’t do the same interactivity with Tweets as you can with post on Twitter.”

Friendfeed is not like Twitter and it doesn’t look like Twitter.