About communication

A while ago I had written a blogpost about “why I’m more active on facebook than on friendfeed”. With the new friendfeed that is up and running for some days now, my previous headline might get turned around now.

Those of you who are used to facebook and twitter will immediately see a lot of similarities – and advantages that friendfeed offers in comparison to the other two services. A lot has already been written about this (like this article on Techcrunch) so I won’t discuss the pros and cons but only state the facts I particularly like in this new version.

The main reasons why the old friendfeed was less attractive to me than facebook was the variety of mash ups facebook offers, the way groups and fanpages were set up and the design. The new friendfeed has now caught up a lot!

The Design

The feedstream looks similar to the facebook wall or twitter stream now:

Of couse you’re still able to aggregate your different feeds into one, which is the original purpose of this service. There are two  things you’ll notice in comparison to the old friendfeed:

1. The service icons from each imported post are gone (the source is still mentioned in written though). I have been told the icons have been removed on purpose to encourage people to comment on all posts in the same way no matter from which service they’re imported. (I’d rather decide about commenting on how interesting a post is and not by which service it came from, but hey…)
2. The link to update a feed has disappeared from the posts. But it hasn’t gone completely, it has only been moved, although this was a bit tricky to find out. Now you have to click on “add/edit services”, then chose the service you want to update and click on “Refresh”.

Twitter inclusive

The big thing is of course the possibility to tweet directly from your friendfeed:

You only need to click the Cc: Twitter box and allow friendfeed to access your twitter account:

As long as the Cc is active, friendfeed will post anything you write there to your twitterfeed and also count the characters you use while you write (to help you match the maximal tweet length):

But be careful! Friendfeed will add a shortlink back to your friendfeed posting after every tweet you’ve sent from here which minimizes your 140 characters to 122!

Posting on friendfeed sent to twitter...

... and the result on twitter

Also tweet your imported posts

But friendfeed doesn’t only allow you to tweet the manually written posts you make there. It also offers the possibility to tweet the posts from your imported feeds. Once you have set up a twitter account on friendfeed you can go to “settings” (next to the Cc box) and you’ll be shown this:

If you click on “Advanced options” you can set up your friendfeed in whatever way you like:

The list of “Post entries from” varies with the list of services you have imported to your friendfeed of course. And the list of available services is long:

Comment, like and share

All posts on friendfeed (the ones written there as well as the imported ones) can be commented, liked and shared. The comments will be displayed under the post like this:

And everytime you comment on something, the whole post with comments will be put into the section “My discussions” that you can access through your friendfeed main menu so you can never miss replies:

Manage your notifications

Friendfeed also allows you to manage the way you want to be notified about updates on your friendfeed and the ones you have subscribed to. Go to “settings” on top right of your friendfeed (under your photo) and you get this:

If you click on Email / IM preferences you’ll come to this page where you can set up which notification to get about what:

Favorites – my favorite

There’s a lot more that could be said about the new friendfeed but I’ll finish this post with the one feature I really like! It’s the “Favorite” feed where you can sum up your best of subscribed to feeds so you don’t miss anything from your favorite connections!

EDIT:

Two more things I’ve forgotten to mention:

• the option to post photos directly to your friendfeed:

• the friendfeed widgets for you to use on other sites are still there (in new design too). You find the link to this option at the bottom of your friendfeed now (“Tools & Widgets”).

What are the features you like best on the new friendfeed?
Or are there things you don’t like at all?
Comment here or on my friendfeed.