TechMiso

FriendFeed, the most prolific lifestreaming service, today launched a beta of their updated and greatly simplified user interface. The FriendFeed beta UI is obviously inspired by Twitter, which also was the motivation for the recent design changes to Facebook. Where Twitter and Facebook fail, FriendFeed excels, offering free flowing real-time updates and the ability to filter the data stream for only the information you desire. The main change – the interface – is exactly what I envisioned when I wrote about FriendFeed being in need of dumbing down!

Taking a page from the Twitter playbook, the FriendFeed interface has been severely dumbed down in an attempt to have mainstream appeal. Although severely simplified, FriendFeed continues to maintain all the power that makes the service the choice among the early adopter crowd. At first glance it might actually appear as if you are visiting Twitter until you look closer and realize FriendFeed is a better – by magnitudes – Twitter.

Most users will find the real power behind the beta in the ability to be continuously pumped real-time data without the need to reload the entire page. The water spicket of information contains both new entries and comments from your friends, retaining all the standard FriendFeed data. This data is spit out so fast that it is almost too difficult to keep up with at times, and is the reason there is a pause button at the top of the page.

It is worth noting that real-time is not necessarily real-time but simply the newest data FriendFeed has for a particular user of a specific service. There are delays between data being posted on a service and the time when it is picked up by FriendFeed.

Clearly the most potent feature is the filtering capabilities – imagine combining Twitter search with the ability to be endlessly fed a stream of data matching your very own search parameters, all with the stable foundation that has made FriendFeed famous. This is the killer FriendFeed feature and what needs to be focused on in order for FriendFeed to stand out above Twitter and Facebook with the mainstream crowd. Had the FF beta been available this weekend during the North Korean missile crisis the filtering and real-time data pumping power would have been easily realized.

FriendFeed is at a turning point in their life and I believe the team is on to something big. Even though Co-Founder Paul Buchheit says there’s no reason multiple players can’t compete in the activity stream space and find success, it is obvious the company is aiming its sights squarely at Facebook and Twitter.

In order to better contend, I believe the FriendFeed beta requires some additional tweaks to make the service even better.

• Direct Messages need to be tweaked so users can send a DM to anyone. While the addition of DM’s was nice, the flawed implementation is identical to Twitter – you can only DM users who you follow and who follow you in return. A DM should be like email whereby users can DM anyone, regardless of following status.
• User Avatars currently take up too much vertical space thus providing far less information above the fold than the previous avatar-less interface. Rather than display 50×50 icons, tone it down to 32×32, or maybe even a little smaller, and slightly modify the font size so more information can be provided on a single screen. This will also allow FriendFeed to still retain the Twitter appearance while having a unique design of its own.
• Comment display should be configurable in such a way so that users can decide to see new comments as they are added to entries -or- a comment number is incremented as new comments are added and clicking on the number “drops down” all the comments on that entry. This would work similarly to how the current “X more comments” link on entries work, but rather than show a single comment users would see the total comments and then click if they opt to do so.
• Third-Party applications helped propel Twitter usage in the early days. While Twhirl offers FriendFeed support, there needs to be Twitterific and Tweetie apps for FriendFeed. I am not necessarily suggesting those applications be built to support the service. What I would like to see are applications which are just as feature rich and easy to use as they are, potentially increasing FriendFeed usage. There is really no decent mobile FriendFeed application on the iPhone, something I find quite surprising considering the crowd that uses the service.
• Service specific view has been removed in favor of using search to locate service specific data. Being able to append “?service=twitter” or “?service=facebook” was a whole lot easier. Each entry should state where it came from so users can browse all entries by a user of that service.

Overall, I like what FriendFeed has done with their new interface. I was somewhat shocked when I first saw it, mainly because it looked so reminiscent of Twitter that I almost thought I accidentally surfed there instead. But after playing with the service for a few hours I really believe FriendFeed is moving in the right direction. FriendFeed is one of the good guys who everyone should be rooting for to succeed!

Have you given the FriendFeed beta a try? If so, what are your thoughts?