FriendFeed Blog

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...

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.

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.

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!

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!

• Ameba - add to my feed
• Baidu (百度空间) - add to my feed
• Custom RSS/Atom - add to my feed
• Dailymotion - add to my feed
• Fotolog - add to my feed
• hatena (はてな) - add to my feed
• LiveJournal - add to my feed
• menéame - add to my feed
• Photobucket - add to my feed
• Skyrock - add to my feed
• Smotri.com - add to my feed

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!

We experienced a number of simultaneous problems today with the servers that run FriendFeed's web site. Since this morning's failure, our site has had intermittent problems, and we are in the process of diagnosing their root causes. We are working to alleviate the problems, and we apologize in advance if you experience any additional issues this evening as we finish deploying the fixes.

We really appreciate your patience, and we will keep you posted as we add safeguards to prevent these types of issues from happening in the future.

The great thing about IM is that it’s instant. You know right away when someone wants to reach you. To give users the option of having that same immediacy when it comes to FriendFeed, we’re now offering FriendFeed over IM:

Now you can get notified whenever someone comments on one of your posts or when there are new posts in your feed. FriendFeed will send you an IM—and you can even talk back. Post to your feed and comment on entries directly from your IM window, using a simple set of commands.

FriendFeed over IM will work with any Google Talk or Jabber account. You can also easily configure the types of IMs notifications you will receive:

After we launched our real-time interface, we heard from so many of you that you loved being able to instantly see the new things in your feed. We also love FriendFeed for the quick and easy communication it offers with our friends. So we're hoping this new way of using FriendFeed will be something that combines both, in a way that already feels fun and familiar. Let us know what you think—chat with us about it in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

To cap off a very busy October, we had a "fix-it day" at the FriendFeed office, where we take a break from our big projects to make time for bug fixes and small features. Here are some of the things we worked on:

• Improved Real-time feed
• You can expand entries in the real-time feed by clicking the chat bubble. The expanded entry shows you the entire conversation so you can see the comment or entry in context
  
• Private entries are marked with a lock icon so they are more easily identifiable
• Improved FriendFeed Bookmarklet
• When you share from Comedy Central, CollegeHumor, the Onion, and Metacafe, your entry will now have an embedded video
• We now automatically pick up thumbnails and videos from pages that have the appropriate <link> tags. Visit our FAQ page for details on supported tags
• Our Atom/RSS feeds now look correct in Google Reader
• You can now send your comments as Twitter @replies in our iPhone interface

Found a bug? Let us know with our Report a bug tool. Got feedback? Share it in everyone's favorite Friendfeed Feedback room.

Happy Halloween, FriendFeeders! To celebrate Halloween, our UI extraordinaire Kevin Fox made an awesome logo:

A high-resolution version is also available. The toothpicks holding up the middle of the e's in the pumpkin are my favorite touch :)

We want to make it easier for you to share your FriendFeed activity on the web services you're already using. Now you can publish your FriendFeed updates directly to Twitter.

To enable this feature, go to your Account page and find the 'Post my FriendFeed entries on Twitter' checkbox under the Feed publishing section. Checking this box will reveal more options. You can publish all your public entries, all your public comments, or both. You can also choose to publish entries from all your services or only share the entries from specific services you've selected.

After you've had a chance to try it out, let us know how well it's working for you in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

While most of our users enjoy FriendFeed on FriendFeed.com, we try to make it as accessible as possible with tools like our Embeddable widgets, iGoogle Gadget, and Facebook Application.

We've spent some time lately enhancing our Facebook Application to make it work better with Facebook's new interface. Notably, you can now add FriendFeed as a tab to your profile. Just click the "+" tab on your profile page (to add a new tab) and choose FriendFeed.

If you haven't already, add the FriendFeed Facebook App to share your FriendFeed activity with your Facebook friends. We're continuing to work on some additional changes, but do let us know what changes are on your wishlist in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

Back in May, we blogged that the idea for Rooms “started when we wanted a better way to share feature ideas and product plans with each other here at FriendFeed, but not the rest of the world—a mini FriendFeed of our own.” Since that launch, our office has become completely dependent on our internal room.

We’ve heard lots of stories of groups of people using private rooms in really interesting ways, including screenwriters sharing script ideas and PR agencies collecting press clippings for their clients. It’s been great to see others using FriendFeed for increasing their communication and productivity as well.

But public rooms have also turned out to be really popular. And we’ve noticed that the FriendFeed community has developed lots of fun and creative ways to make the most of them—from sports enthusiasts discussing basketball, to friends posting photos, to early adopters requesting and sharing invites for private beta web services. Just yesterday, Pepsi launched a room to discuss its new visual identity with potential brand ambassadors.

As rooms usage increased, more and more people have asked for a way to find and browse public rooms. So we're happy to now offer room search:

Searching works for words in the room name or description. We even offer some personalized room recommendations based on rooms that are popular among your friends, as well as the entire FriendFeed community.

So go ahead, find an interesting room to join. With just a week left to go, maybe the US Politics room? Or, if even another week seems unbearable to you, there's always the No Politics Allowed room. (I, for one, have recently become addicted to the Movie Reviews room, which I keep open in a mini window throughout the day.) And as always, please keep your feedback coming!

Did you know that FriendFeed has a bookmarklet that lets you share links and clip images directly from your browser? Did you know that you can email messages and photos to FriendFeed from your phone?

We have a lot of cool extras you might not have heard about, so we created a comprehensive list of FriendFeed tools to make them more discoverable. We'll keep the page updated as we launch new stuff so you have a one-stop shop for FriendFeed goodies.

As always, let us know what you think in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

We've gotten a lot of suggestions from room owners on ways we can improve Rooms on FriendFeed. Today, we’re releasing two small customizations that are designed to let room owners have more control over their rooms’ appearance and content.

We now offer room admins the ability to mark-up their room's description. We support a limited set of HTML tags that should fit your needs. Most notably, you can now use bold, italics, and linking tags in your room descriptors.

Room admins can also now choose whether they want comment moderation on their semi-public rooms. This can be particularly useful if you want to embed your room on your own web site. When commenting in a moderated room, a user will see “Pending” before their unapproved comment, and will also have the option of editing or deleting the comment without needing to wait for an admin to approve or reject it. Room admins will see the approval-pending comments at the top of that room and also in the entries themselves.

We’re still working on a number of ways to improve rooms overall. As always, give us your thoughts in the FriendFeed Feedback Room.