FriendFeed, the popular social activity aggregator, has written a blog post announcing a new redesign of the site that is currently in public beta. You can check out the site at http://beta.friendfeed.com/.
Among the highlights of the new design are Friend Lists, which allow users to separate their friends into discrete groups (much as they would in Facebook’s list feature). Users can also use the new Friend lists to prioritize their incoming activity streams by segregating their less interesting friends to a separate list so they don’t always appear in the default feed.
The Friend Lists also support “Fake Following” – a seemingly unintuitive feature that allows users to look like they’re following their friends without actually getting their updates. Users often expect to have their “Follows” reciprocated by their peers, and a failure to do so can lead to bruised egos. But indiscriminate following comes with a price too, as it ultimately leads to an unmanageable amount of noise (and stories you might not care about). Fake Following manages to skirt the issue with a digital white lie, and is a feature Twitter (which has a similar system) should offer too.
Also included with the update is a new photo feature, which allows users to upload photos alongside their their posts without installing a plugin.
Finally, users will also be able to view other users’ home feeds. While this may sound a bit creepy at first, the feeds will only display information that is publicly available anyway, but in a more organized fashion. To ensure privacy, these feeds will also ignore Friends Lists, so outside users won’t be able to tell which Friend List you’ve put them on.
“a new resign of the site ”
Please proof-read before pressing the submit button! And I hope “resign” is not in your mind
I really love the group feature. And the design change makes navigation much easier, and conversations more manageable. I’m off to explore the other features!
I still find it chaotic and unreadable…as long as there isn’t a decent way to actually follow friendfeed streams I’ll use other services…
re: “Fake Follow”…
Don’t Fake the Funk on a Nasty Dunk
“… this must be a rookie thing or something.”
How long before the blog post, tweet, or other that says. “Are you really following me?”
Someone will get caught, and if they’re a web-celeb, it will be on vwag.
Yes, it will be definitely interesting to see who will be the first but since I don’t see any way to prove the following is a fake one I don’t believe anyone will have to admit it. So when suspicions arise, people will simply deny it. Honestly, I don’t understand why FF is giving this opportunity for abuse to spammers.
Does anyone else think that this idea of the “fake follow” is a techies way of trying to solve an insolvable problem? I am extremely surprised that FriendFeed will try and implement this. It is only helpful to those “web-celebs” in reality — and I consider it a very bold and arrogant move. The fact that someone would like to follow you is a privilege not a right. And by throwing it back into their face with a “fake follow” is down right appalling in my humble opinion. Whether someone like Scoble actually start following my tweets, friendfeed or anything else is really a mute point — honesty is the best policy – and this feature seems to spay in honesty’s face.
Completely agree. The fact they see this problem as being important enough to add a new complexity to the site really shows how narrow their target audience is.
yup, if ur ego is going to be bruised so easily, perhaps human communication isnt for you :/
spat*. Almost got through the post without my nephew being on my lap being an issue…[sigh]
FriendFeed: the social network for phony jerks! How about growing a spine and not hiding behind virtual walls?
The more people that believe they don’t have to put effort or thought into posts, the more “ugh! soup for lunch” we’re going to get. No one following you is a great kick in the rear to start thinking about how to be more interesting.
Also, to a point brought up by TechCrunch itself, one of the things that makes Twitter work is that you know your audience. Break that down, and what’s the point of sending updates?
Hey, TC, do you have a bug-reporting link?
If you ctrl-+ 4 times in FF3 (which I do, for easier reading), some comments get munged. Try doing it, and then look at Svetlana’s comment above.
I would just send in a bug report, but I can’t find a place to do it…
Social not-working. Boring.
Nothing speaks more to the one-sidedness of these services than this feature. Now I can ~pretend to follow you and you’d have no real way of knowing that I’m faking, because conversation hardly factors into it.
http://radar.ne...e-que-cest.html
What’s next? Fake friends for those that feel they don’t have enough friends on your service?
Very weak of FriendFeed. This is trying to fix the broken social model of your software with gaffer tape and rubber bands.
http://friendfe...t/faq#imaginary
LiveJournal has offered custom friend groups and ‘default views’ (a filtered view of posts by the people you _really_ want to follow, instead of everyone on your ‘friend’ list) for several years now – these concepts are not being invented by Facebook, Twitter, etc – they’re all playing catch-up still. The LJ friend-list and post-filtering set-up is incredibly versatile compared to every single other social networking site I’ve used.
That said, a single friends list is a poor way to manage the two very different relationships ‘people I trust to read my friends-only posts’ and ‘people whose posts I want to read’. That’s why the DreamWidth project is currently rewriting the LJ code to separate these concepts into ‘trust’ and ‘follow’ lists instead – which will put them even further ahead of the poor granularity and half-arsed implementations offered by sites such as Facebook.
LiveJournal has been around for so long that tech journalists and bloggers seem to have forgotten that it exists, let alone that it solved half of these problems years before the current ‘cool’ sites even realised they existed. Maybe DreamWidth will catch some of that ‘new, therefore shiny’ wave when it launches, and we’ll see some of their good ideas incorporated into the other social-networking sites over time.
Stupidest feature in the history of sosial web!