Why I Didn’t Get to See FriendFeed’s Redesign

Last week, while in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo, I was invited to go check out the new version of FriendFeed. Not being from the area, and to be honest, not having time to figure out how far away the office was from the Expo, I didn’t even pull up the address for the meeting from my mobile phone until after the last session of the day, at which time I had just over half an hour to grab a cab.

As it turns out, FriendFeed was inviting me to come out to Mountain View where their offices are. They were not, as many other companies were during the Expo, coming to town themselves. And Mountain View was an hour away. By train.

This fact was terribly upsetting to me since I now only had half an hour to get there. Apparently, in order for me to have made it on time, I would have had to left the conference early…and missed some really good sessions!

The first thing I did was call to see if it was possible to arrive late. I was basically told that the event probably wouldn’t go that late and perhaps I shouldn’t waste my time. I expressed how disappointed I was considering that I don’t live in California and this was quite the opportunity – I was sorry to miss it.

I was then told that perhaps I could come the next day for lunch. I said that would be great – I would try to make arrangements and I would let them know either way. I immediately found a friend willing to give me a ride out there the next day, and promptly called them back. I could be there by 1 PM, I said. Great! No wait…was the answer I received. Apparently 1 PM may not work after all, I was told. (I thought that 1 PM would have counted as “lunch time” but I guess not). I was told they would have to check on that and get back in touch.

Ironically, after I hung up the phone, I logged onto FriendFeed and saw the note from Robert Scoble which read that he was on his way to FriendFeed. “Just now?” I thought…that means he must have been late too – unless he was already halfway there when he posted it. But that’s neither here nor there, I guess.

Sadly, what I thought was going to be the highlight of my whole trip was turning out to be the biggest disappointment.

Anyway, FriendFeed didn’t get back in touch until much later and not via phone, but via email. I was invited to come out at 11:30 AM the next day. Well, as you may or may not know, schedules at the Web 2.0 Expo are pretty jam-packed. I would have had to cancel other appointments and miss a good chunk of the conference to attend. I then asked for an opportunity to do a phone briefing instead since I couldn’t make this one and only time they had open.

I was told that I could do a phone briefing on Sunday, but what with me flying cross-country all day Saturday, I didn’t get to respond to that email until Sunday rolled around, so perhaps, again I was too late. For whatever reason, no call was ever arranged, nor was I added to the beta preview, even though subsequent emails flowed on Sunday when another RWW’er was communicating with my FriendFeed contact regarding the story.

Overall, the whole experience was really upsetting, but in the end, I think I’m OK that I missed it. I mean, Robert Scoble was there, so of course he will have video and everyone will be watching him for the news anyway. I had just wanted, as a FriendFeed enthusiast, to have the opportunity to check it out too. I’m not really sure why it had to be so difficult. Or why they would want me to have to miss parts of the conference to see this.

It’s also interesting to compare the difficulty of this experience with the offer I received from Loic Le Meur. We were chatting about Seesmic Desktop (aka Twhirl) and he invited me to come by his offices. I asked him if there was any particular time that would be good and he said, give him a call and he would make the time. I thought that was really generous, but it also provided an interesting contrast between his offer and this FriendFeed event.

In the end, I felt like FriendFeed may have thought they were doing me a favor to have invited me in the first place. When I couldn’t make it, they just couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) accommodate my schedule – or even arrange a phone briefing – so I could preview their latest. And that’s fine, I suppose. That must mean they are really busy, so good for them.

Or maybe I’m just being a prima donna about the whole thing. That’s possible too.

But now it turns out that I won’t be covering their latest. I’ll leave that up to all the other (exclusively-invited) journalists to do. And even if the redesign is the most radical thing ever and completely blows your mind, I have no business writing about it…I’ll be excitedly checking it out right along with all you folks. And that’s OK, I assure you. There are plenty of other places to get the FriendFeed news today…and I’m sure you can count on two fingers the first two places you’ll turn to.

Still, I have to say: I’m disappointed. Really disappointed. Partly in myself for missing the first appointment and partly in FriendFeed for making it so difficult to connect later on.

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Alan Cheslow, a FriendFeed fanatic whose entire personal web site is built around the service, has just created a new widget which FriendFeed fans are definitely going to love. Unlike the official FriendFeed widgets that show off your stats or your feed, this new widget shows off your friends instead.

The FFavatars widget is sort of like the friends block on Facebook, but one that’s filled with your FriendFeed subscribers. Since the FriendFeed API doesn’t directly implement a way to fetch your subscriber list, Alan worked around this issue by fetching your “subscribed to” list then checking to see if each of those friends were also subscribed back to you. The end result is a widget that only shows your mutual FriendFeed friendships.

If you want to try it out on your own web site, just copy and paste this code (below) into your web site:

<div style=”width:300px;border:1px solid #ccc;”><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://cheslow.com/ffavatars/?nickname=acheslow&size=large&max=12″></script></div>
<p>

All you need to do is replace where it says “nickname” with your own FriendFeed username.

If you want to edit the size of avatars or the number of avatars displayed, you can use this code instead:

<div style=”width:300px;border:1px solid #ccc;”><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://cheslow.com/ffavatars/?nickname=acheslow&size=large&max=12″></script></div>

To modify the size, the options are:

size=[small|medium|large]

and to modify the max number, the options are:

max=[number]

Note that the widget only shows 15 of your random friends by default if you don’t change it otherwise. You can see the widget in action both on Alan’s site here or on mine here.

Many people have made arguments for the productive uses of FriendFeed, noting its liveblogging rooms, potential for blog fodder, community building aspects, etc. Those are all great reasons to love the site, but at the end of the day, I still see FriendFeed as a timesuck. A huge, glorious, fabulous, incredible timesuck.

I’ve been spending more time in FriendFeed lately. Where before I wasn’t even a daily visitor, now I’m in and out throughout the day. I’m not much one for getting involved too deeply in the discussions on site, but I enjoy reading through them. And I’m also completely addicted to Mona’s feed. It is, as she would say, so. much. awesome.

Given my recent addiction enjoyment of the site, you would think I would have known about the FriendFeed toolbar. I mean, really! The toolbar isn’t an official offering from FriendFeed itself, but rather a Firefox add-on provided by the third-party FriendFeed tracker, ffholic. With the toolbar, you can search users and entries or search ffholic itself. There are, of course, quick links to various pages on ffholic (“most liked,” “most commented,” etc.), but it’s the “Latest Buzz” drop-down box that I’m really enjoying.

This button offers up a slew of links to the hottest stuff being shared on FriendFeed and clicking on those links takes you directly to the source. If the source is a FriendFeed post, then you’re taken to FriendFeed, but if it’s a blog post, flickr photo, video, etc., you’re taken to the original content, not the FriendFeed web site.

There’s also a “Share on FriendFeed” button and an optional timer for you to track your time on site. I’ve just installed this toolbar and already I’ve managed to waste over 40 minutes today. Excellent.

I’d love to see even more buttons on this toolbar which would link to “best of” pages, but for now, it works for me.

Seriously, how did I not know about this?

Today, I asked this question on Twitter and I got some interesting responses:

Now I’m really curious. I was surprised to see so many NO’s. I guess I thought that most of the people following me on Twitter would probably be social media enthusiasts who loved the FriendFeed service, too. This is a great example of how you can gain valuable insight from a quick Twitter poll. And it also convinces me that the Twitter audience is becoming more diverse than ever - not everyone is as much of a social media crack addict as I once thought.

I decided to follow this up with a longer post on RWW tomorrow and a more in-depth poll. I hope you’ll check back in the morning and participate.

FriendFeed

Better FriendFeed is a new Greasemonkey script based on the work done by Duncan Riley and AJ Batac. Basically, it’s a bunch of great FriendFeed scripts in one. With Better FriendFeed, you can do the following:

• Add and remove custom tabs to FriendFeed simply by specifying the URL and/or favicon UR
• Activate Cleaner FriendFeed to make everything a little "prettier"
• Configuration is located at Tools->Greasemonkey->User Script Commands->Better FriendFeed

The script creator notes that you should probably disable any other FriendFeed tabs scripts before installing this one.  However, I left my FriendFeed Tabs script installed (which adds Techmeme in a tab) and had no issues.

By default, the Better FriendFeed script adds Google Reader, Gmail, and Identi.ca to FriendFeed. Wow, I have those tabs open all the time! This is excellent. 

Oh, and how cool is this? If you have any questions or concerns, you can “dent” him on Identi.ca! (http://identi.ca/rahsheen) Nice!

Feedly

Next up, Feedly. For those of you who don’t know what or why Feedly is incredibly awesome, here’s a guide to get you started.

You wouldn’t really think of Feedly as something that needs a facelift, but it got one anyway by way of the Stylish Extension for Firefox. A blogger by the name of SLAX created a nice gray/blue dark skin for the site. You can click here to install it into Stylish.

Happy Friday!

Other Adobe AIR clients have had trouble competing with Twhirl thanks to that app’s overwhelming popularity among Twitter users, but a little app called Posty has a shot. That’s mainly due to the fact that it offers the ability to multi-post to a number of services in a manner that’s similar to how HelloTxt or Ping.fm operate.

Today, there’s a new version of Posty that fans of this app will like even better – especially since some of the most requested features have now been added – most notably identi.ca support and a new, smaller size.

The full feature list of this version includes:

• Identi.ca support
• A new minimum size of 380 pixels
• The ability to minimize Posty to the system tray in Windows
• The ability to automatically clear the text message when posting is successful
• A notification mechanism that lets you see public tweets from the public timeline every 3 minutes. This feature is experimental so turn it off if it gets in your way.

Unfortunately, to get this version of Posty installed, you have to remove the old one (or just install it into a different folder).

You know how this goes – you mark it for later and then don’t get around to it. Maybe these wouldn’t have filled out an entire blog post or maybe there’s not that much to say about them, but they’re worth a mention nonetheless. They’re kind of awesome. This is no spliced in del.icio.us link list – I killed that long ago, please go do the same. This is a list of worthy links.

I’ve done this before, but it’s not a regular feature. Anyway, here we go:

• I found some hacker’s blog with a tip on how to get a 3G iPhone for $199 without a contract. Totally exploiting a loophole. My guess is that loophole is closed now, but I’m not certain. Anyone want to try it? It’s sort of a lot of work and probably illegal, so I think I’ll just wait to buy one later. 
• From CNet, a post on gAttach: “gAttach is a small utility that reassigns Gmail as the default mail account from Windows documents. With gAttach installed, selecting Send from Windows Explorer, Firefox, and Microsoft Office automatically attaches the files to a Gmail composition instead of opening a new e-mail in your mail client.” Oh hello! I totally needed that.
• From DownloadSquad: Last.fm integration into geeky media player, VLC. The pre-release of VLC 0.9.0 Media Player for both Windows and Mac now supports Last.fm (Audioscrobbler). To enable Last.fm support in the 0.9.0 release, enter your username in the preferences pane under Audioscrobber.
• You’ve seen FriendZone but have you seen FriendVenn? FriendVenn is a FriendFeed app that divides your relationships into a venn diagram of people who you subscribe to who don’t subscribe to you, people who both subscribe to you and who you subscribe to, and people who only subscribe to you.
• Another excellent FriendFeed script from the man who brought you the better recommended page and the better subscribed to me script. It’s the FriendFeed Profile. This script adds a user profile section on FF user pages. It retrieves Twitter and LinkedIn info if available and allows customization of which fields to display by editing the script and setting the variables at the top. Now I can figure out who all of you people really are. Nice!

Posty, an Adobe AIR app I mentioned briefly here is a tool that lets you update Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, FriendFeed, and Pownce all at once. Today, this app has received an update which brings with it several new features that make the app much more useful than before. These new features include the ability to browse Twitter friends’ statuses, the ability to browse FriendFeed friends’ entries, the addition of Twitter search powered by Summize, and the addition of built-in FriendFeed search. With these new features, Posty is transforming itself from just a multi-service update tool like HelloTxt on AIR to a full-fledged client for interacting with these various micro-blogging services.

One thing that wasn’t updated are the themes. The theme changer only updates the font color used to label the updates and other items. Although there are several different themes to choose from in Posty, but all of them keep the black background which many people find hard to read.

They’ve also announced that Plurk and identi.ca will also be supported as soon as those sites release an official API.

I’ve been looking into ways to get my followers in sync between the various services I’m using, mainly FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, and Identi.ca. It’s not easy. Of course there’s the Twitter 2 FriendFeed Importer, but ultimately, adding contacts is still very much a manual process these days. I tend to batch this process on a regular basis by going through my email and opening tab after tab (see?). This is insanity, actually.

My need for data portability is desperate. I’m literally wasting huge amounts of my time adding, adding, adding the same friends over and over again. If you’re my friend online, then you should just be my friend no matter what service I sign up for. I’m quite sick of it.

And for the most part, what we’re getting from developers are YAWA offerings – that’s “yet another web app” - instead of tools that help us manage the ones we have today. And because they’re these shiny new objects, we sign up, add friends, and the cycle repeats. It repeats because we’ve just proved to the app’s creators this is what we want. It repeats because we’re going to sign up for the next app, too.

So when I see someone trying to address this issue, I get excited. Whether it works or not, I’m excited because they care. They’re at least moving in the right direction.

I was excited about the post I did today on Genome. They’re trying to make identities flexible and portable, but did this get a lot of positive comments? No. And the ones left weren’t even that nice.

I don’t get it. Explain it to me, because today, I’m lost. Do we, as social media enthusiasts really only care about the next cool thing and not about the process of actually making these tools effective for the everyday user. Is that just “oh, ho-hum, that’s for someone else to worry about?”

I hope that’s not the case. Hey, I love the next new thing as much as the next guy (see identi.ca early adopter tips), but I give equal time to the problem-solvers, too.

So, on that note, here’s your problem solver tip for today:

From the same guy who brought you the Better FriendFeed Subscribed To Me script, comes the Better FriendFeed Recommended Page. It works by finding the subscriptions of your subscriptions and sorts them by popularity (mutual subscriptions) as shown below:

There you go, equal time. Something useful. That deserved a post.

FriendFeed/Twitter AIR app Feedalizr has just launched into beta today. They had been previously been in a public alpha, but they now feel that their feature set is rich enough and enough of the bugs have been squashed to qualify their app as a beta.

Along with the launch, feedalizr has been updated with a few new features that make it worth a look, including support for FriendFeed’s rooms. With the new app, you’ll now get the messages that have been sent directly to the rooms you’re a member of and you, in turn, can also post directly to a room via a drop down box that lists all the rooms which belong to.

Another new feature is tab support. With this, you can choose to see just your Twitter messages in a tab, for example. To activate this feature, you only need to click on the service icon from your FriendFeed stream to show all the posts from that service. When you load more tabs than you have room for, feedalizr just adds an arrow so you to scroll over to the others that don’t fit on the app’s main screen.

In addition, this release improves support for Twitter DMs by adding a “direct” link underneath a friend’s tweet.

Of course, Feedalizr has always stood out from the other AIR apps by including support for Jaiku as well as support for flickr and video uploads. If you’re looking for a good FriendFeed desktop client, Feedalizr should be on your list.

You can download the latest version here.