FriendFeed Beta Becomes FriendFeed Regular. Hope You Like Real-time.
Earlier this month, FriendFeed re-opened the beta testing area of its site to test a major redesign and a big new feature: Real-time updates. Today, it has removed the beta label from the new features, and pushed the new features live to the regular site.
Initially, there was quite a bit of concern from beta testers that the real-time updates were simply too much information being thrown at you, too quickly. But over the past several weeks, that talk has quieted quite a bit, and users seem to be acclimated to the live updating functionality. Of course, there have been some who also chose to use the regular, more static FriendFeed site still, so it will be interesting to see how those users react now.
This roll-out is potentially important for other social sites as well. The biggest is of course Facebook, which has stated its desire to make the site’s news feed streams update in real-time. Given the initial backlash FriendFeed saw against real-time, one can only imagine how bad it would have been received on Facebook. Especially considering that site has over 200 million users sending updates.
And it’s likely that fact that is delaying the roll-out of the real-time data flow on Facebook, I’m hearing. That functionality was first talked about during the preview event for the most recent redesign back in early March. But with its new social stream API, Facebook is allowing other sites to access some of its data flow in real-time, and to build apps that handle it.
But real-time updates aren’t the only new feature of FriendFeed. Aside from the aforementioned redesign that makes the site have a cleaner look, there is improved search functionality — including the ability to easily search for users. There is also a way to easily save searches that you do often on the site and have them easily accessible.
There is also a new feature that it’s calling “FriendFeed By Email.” Basically, this allows users to interact with the service through an email account. This includes sending updates and images, and getting custom updates back, including comments and “likes” on the items you have posted to the service.
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