16 Simple Ways to Improve FriendFeed

Despite my initial skepticism, I am enjoying using FriendFeed (“FF” from here out). I find interesting stories & news articles from my friends, I hear about news from colleagues, and am able to interact with them all in one place. I also like hearing from “related strangers” and finding new “friends” (Internet friends, that is) through the process. Below is my list of some simple things FF could do to easily enhance the overall experience.

1. Subscribing to Subscribers – Right now you have to manually go subscriber by subscriber. FF should add a button next to each person’s name for instant subscribing (like on the “recommended” tab). Also a “subscribe to all my subscribers” would be nice
2. Find my Friends – I should be able to point at my Plaxo/LinkedIn/address book, and have FF automagically add whomever’s in there into my subscribers list (should also allow me to choose which ones specifically)
3. Use “interestingness” more – The current list of “who’s subscribed to me” is stagnant, calculated by some ranking. Use the info from the stats page to show a more dynamic list.
4. Nested comments – no-brainer.
5. Re-ping my Subscriptions – I have friends who I am subscribed to who were surprised to find me on FF. There’s no way for me to easily renotify people I exist.
6. Add to the “like” feature – I think a “dislike” button would be interesting (even if the results were hidden) as it could help add to the interestingness meter. Also, I’d like to see “Agree/Disagree With” as options, since they are very different from “like”.
7. De-duplicating redundant entries – if I write a blog post then mark it in Twitter or Delicious, FF should be smart enough to remove the extra entries (or group them). This could be crowdsourced as well, in case the automatic version is too hard to build.
8. More 2-way data sharing – if I like it on FF, then favorite it on Twitter. If I comment on a discussion, send it to Disqus or the blog comment system. Etc. Edit (per a comment on FF): this should be an option for the user.
9. Surface the interesting features more – the ability to see stats, discussions, etc is very cool, but the features are buried away.
10. Enable auto-TinyURL in posts – all URLs should get Tiny’d. Edit (per a comment on FF): this should be an option for the user.
11. Create filters – I’d like to be able to filter out terms completely – for example, I have no interest in hearing anything political on FF, so would happily filter out Obama, Hillary, McCain, and other terms.
12. Add “friends of friends” as a main tab – in addition to “me”, “friends”, and “everyone”, I’d like to see the feeds of my friends’ friends. This would be especially handy when I want to filter them out from my main feed.
13. Make history more relevant – how about a timeline? how about seeing all the stuff of mine that other people have commented on? how about seeing my most popular stuff?
14. UI clean-up – I read Louis Gray’s post on using the hide function, and while it’s extremely helpful, it just shouldn’t be that hard! Don’t agree? Go read tip#5 in that post again, and you’ll see how unintuitive that process really is.
15. Make a control panel – too many things going on (this is really an extension of #14) in too many places. Give me a single place to make all my settings happen, and I’ll be a happy camper.
16. Fix the glaring typo on this page. Here, I’ll make it easy for ya…

That’s it for now, hope to see some of these happen!

Update: Thomas Hawk has 16 more ways to improve FF!