If you’ve missed the phenomena, FriendFeed is taking the first adopter world by storm. I wasn’t initially convinced, but after asking Louis Gray to convince me , I gave it another shot, and now I’m completely hooked.
I’ve touched previously on some of my thoughts as to the features FriendFeed could add, but here’s my entire wish list. These aren’t exclusively actionable by FriendFeed themselves so includes items that relate to the way 3rd parties interact with FriendFeed as well.
Custom Tabs
I imported all my Twitter contacts into FriendFeed the other day and ever since I’ve been a little swamped by Twitter comments as opposed to other streams in the FriendFeed collective. One person suggested that I should filter all Tweets out, but I have no desire to do so because unlike Twitter FriendFeed gives me a reliable archive of Tweets, and it’s a decent Twitter client as well.
My proposal is custom tabs. A FriendFeed user could decide to filter exclusively or for sorting purposes various inputs. In my case I could say I want all Tweets to go into an exclusive tab but they are excluded from my main friends tab. This way I can switch across to tweets whenever I wanted to. Perhaps a separate option might place Tweets back in my main Friends tab only when there is a FriendFeed discussion underneath each Tweet (as is often the case). But lets extend the idea further: a user could set up tabs for any content, say every Digg from their friends, Tumblr entry, or combination’s there-in, and this could be exclusive to the tab or inclusive, serving as a content filter if you like.
Take it another step further: custom word searches (not unlike Google News alerts) based on tabs. Say I wanted a vanity search based on anyone mentioning me on FriendFeed, or if I was a company monitoring FriendFeed mentions. The search facility is already there, it could easily be extended to a custom tab.
Disqus FriendFeed Integration
This is a topic that has been discussed extensively over the last 24-48 hours and I think it’s a great idea. I’m already using Glenn Slaven’s excellent WordPress FriendFeed plugin here at The Inquisitr, but imagine a world where Disqus and FriendFeed comments are one instead of two separate comment threads. Lets hope this happens.
A better integrated Twitter/ FriendFeed client
I’ve written about the various clients in this space twice recently , but I still find myself unhappy with the various offerings. I’ve switched back to using Twhirl after some time using MySocial’s AIR client. I find myself using FriendFeed primarily via the website because the Twhirl FriendFeed experience is awful…I’ll be typing then lose everything I’ve written, it looks and feels clunky. And yet, Twhirl has the most features both for FriendFeed but more importantly for Twitter. There are better looking clients, but for some strange reason great aesthetics seems to equate with feature fail in the emerging FriendFeed client space. I want something that looks like and is as easy to use as Feedalizer or MySocial but is easily sizable (Feedalizer is fat) and has the depth of features that Twhirl has.
Twitter killing/ short message service
I’ve written about this previously, and people seemed to think that I was saying that FriendFeed will kill Twitter. What I said is that FriendFeed should kill Twitter, and that they are the best placed to do so, however I did not say that what they are doing at the moment is in any way, shape or form a Twitter killer.
If FriendFeed offered a short message service built on top of their current platform (call it FF messages or something), that was offered to users as part of their FriendFeed experience, or as another tab (similar to the custom tab proposal above), with the ability for 3rd party clients to use the API to offer desktop or mobile solutions that only focused on that feature, we have a Twitter killer. The ONLY reason Twitter has maintained its position today is community, something that Pownce and Jaiku never had, despite both (arguably) having better platforms. And lets face it, Twitter didn’t get to where it was today due to its ability to deliver a reliable service. FriendFeed already has the community with a lot of cross-over with Twitter, and many Twitter users would happily dump Twitter for another product if they knew that the alternative already included most, if not all of their existing contacts/ community. It’s a market and space that is ripe for the taking.
Start Page/ Widgets
This idea is a little out of left field, but I’ve been spending a bit of time on Netvibes lately and it seems to struggle in my mind as a standalone idea (at least for me). If we could do custom tabs, perhaps FriendFeed could start offering a start page service complete with support for widgets. Imagine being able to flick between FriendFeed tabs where one of those tabs offers an iGoogle feature set? The tech isn’t that hard (I’ve actually looked at buying a $399 script that does this sort of site off the shelf) and the widgets themselves use the open standard championed by Netvibes. It would be a nice value add for FriendFeed that could easily find favor.
If you could add things to FriendFeed, what would they be?