While Twitter is busy removing features, or half removing them, or whatever — FriendFeed continues its relentless pace at adding new ones. The latest one today is small, but potentially very, very useful. Basically, you can now get emails/IMs/pop-up notifications from any group or individual user on FriendFeed.
While it may not be so obvious at first, this is useful because you can custom tailor FriendFeed to use even when you’re not on the site. The way I’ve been using it for several months now is to create groups for people/things I’m particularly interested in. But that would still require that I go to FriendFeed to check those groups. Now I can just get pinged over IM every time something I’m looking for comes up.
My colleague Steve Gillmor should love this, because this allows you to basically track something without being actively engaged in the service. It doesn’t yet work for saved searches on FriendFeed — which would allow you to track any keyword, but you can imagine that will come soon as well. Track is a feature that Twitter used to have to ping people when a keyword was said. It had to discontinue the service when Twitter kept crashing last year as it grew it size. It’s still supposedly coming back one day, but it would seem FriendFeed, once again, may beat them to it.
And while tracking keywords is interesting, I’m actually more interested in people track — which is what this is. And since FriendFeed of course imports Twitter messages, this basically is a track of people on Twitter too. And if you really want to get fancy, you can just track when a user likes something on FriendFeed and have it ping you, or a number of other options.
And this doesn’t have to just be over IM. You can get these notifications over email or using FriendFeed’s AIR-based popup notifier. Slick.
Ok, this is getting ridiculous. You guys started out as a very cool, useful technology blog and now you have turned into the CNN of Twitter. There are other companies and even some that, fuck I don’t know, MAKE MONEY. I just checked and twitterCrunch.com is taken, I hope you guys registered it, because otherwise it looks like someone is aiming to put you completely out of business.
Actually, CNN is the CNN of Twitter.
http://valleywa...rick-sanchez-do
Also, this post isn’t about Twitter.
But seriously, these comments are jut getting boring.
So Friendfeed and FriendConnect needs to take over Blog comment management to allow Like/Hide ratings on comments and thus to filter through the many TechCrunch comments by quality.
And thus not only display blog comments chronologically and threaded.
FriendFeed looks to be on upbeat mode with this. Think Twitter needs more tweaking in the features department. Poor Evan Williams and Dorsey are working hard at it, still nothing seems to work out.
MG, why don’t you suggest something to put Twitter beat FF on this? Maybe, another of your plum blog posts on Twitter?
Forget TechCrunch comments. First we need Like/Hide for YouTube. Not that anyone’s really interested in reading YT comments…
MG, looks like every time you write something (with Twitter mentioned once or twice in it) people think the whole post is about Twitter. You’re probably so synonymous with Twitter as far of TC readers are concerned
@Aaron: Read well, this is about FriendFeed beating Twitter, not Twitter actually.
What will be a killer feature is when they filter filtered searches using an algorithm on the amount of likes users get for their items. This will filter out the good stuff from all the noise automatically.
For example:
- If I add some intelligent, precise, relevant items on my feeds that other users like on friendfeed, then my friendfeed activity should be rated more relevant than the random tweet that is going through all the feeds.
- Friendfeed should implement liking of comments on items, so a user can gain “points” by posting intelligent, relevant, precise comments in all sorts of real-time conversations on friendfeed.
- Real-time conversations on friendfeed should be filterable by relevancy of the comments. The interface should make it possible for thousands of users to be in the same chat room, yet still every user by default only sees the most relevant chat comment items, while the rest of the noize stays in layers further down which are hidden by default but can be shown as well.
- This will make it possible to type any topic of your interest on the friendfeed global search, then view a real-time stream of items and comments being posted about that topic. And even with thousands of users interested about the same topics and items, frienfeed should filter not only by friends, but also using those algorithms on general likes but also on likes by friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, and stuff like that, including also based on likes of liked users, likes of liked liked users. And so on. To determine in fact a personal relevancy on the stream of news to each user and not only a general relevancy.
You can already filter searches by the number of likes.
I remember ffholic.com having some point system, don’t remember how it was calculated though.
If you feed a Twitter Search RSS into a FF Group, we’re getting pretty close to Twitter Track, it seems.
Yeah, good call.
Yipee! FriendFeed just got even better!
awesome!
Deadfeed
I finally found a use for the friendfeed desktop app. sweet. it’s all starting to make sense.
cant wait to go home and try this out! this is gonna b awesome on my home pc.
There is just one thing makes me wonder. Why are you guys so interested in or crazy about such services? Friendfeed, twitter, facebook, orkut etc. What is the aim? Getting socialized? getting some info shouldnt be stealing that much time.
Does this mean that I can now track every discussion about bacon and follow the latest LOLcats?! I love Friendfeed and the real-time conversation continues to improve all the time.
More tuna juice. Sigh. http://www.tunajuice.com
I hope Friendfeed succeeds so Arrington can get rich
agreed!
adding more didn’t mean getting better
lol i hope so
very kool! wish you could use it for your saved searches though. i have some that just pull twitter posts and would love to just track those.
i like the tweak though. good stuff.
Good article, the advertisment is sold?