Ten Things I'd Like FriendFeed To Do

1) I want to reply to a comment, like I can in disqus, and not have to use an @ sign
2) if the post is an mp3, put a play button like the yahoo or delicious player does
3) if the post a photo, put a thumbnail of the photo right in the feed. i realize it does that for flickr, but not for tumblr.
4) Allow me to do an @reply right from FriendFeed into Twitter
5) Let me explode the link into the first paragraph of the post right in FriendFeed
6) When i post a comment on FriendFeed, let me also post it to Flickr, or the blog through the blog’s or comment system’s API
7) When someone comments on my feed, send me an email that I can reply to and post a reply back (like Disqus does)
8) Let me view my friend’s posts ordered by friend as another option in addition to reverse chronological order
9) Let me bookmark a delcious link from someone else by just clicking an icon right on the page and not leaving FriendFeed
10) Let me see the number of people following me

For those not familiar with FriendFeed, here’s my feed

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. carlobm

    Agree. Especially item 5 — not just the first but the entire content.

  2. dshaw

    Great suggestions. l’d put the post-backs and notifications on the top of my list (esp. responding to Twitter).

  3. Mike Champion

    Good suggestions. I’d also like to filter out some services. I end up seeing some tweets like 3 times between twitter itself, facebook and friend feed.

    1. fredwilson

      right. because some of these other services offer aggregation too (like tumblr). finding the root URL/post and filtering out other references to it shouldn’t be too hard and would be a great feature.

      1. RealBird.com

        I wonder if these aggregators has some sort of protocol in place or planned, so that nobody ends up creating (intentionally or unintentionally) an infinite loop, a “video feedback loop” for feeds. Like MyBlogLog aggregating FriendFeed and FriendFeed aggregating MyBlogLog. As these services will develop further into their own verticals and creating distinct services on top of the core aggregation feature, it can explode into something unexpected. I am not sure that the root Url is sufficient enough to be tracked by. This problem will certainly effect usability at some point in the future and usability is simply the biggest deal when it comes to aggregators like FriendFeed.– Zoltan

        1. fredwilson

          This is the number one issue/feature request I hear aboutFred

    2. Joe Lazarus

      Graysky, there’s a somewhat buried feature that lets you hide certain content like Twitter posts from people you’re already following through Twitter itself. For example, if you click on the “options” link next to one of the Twitter posts, you’ll see a link to “hide entries like this”. It’s not perfect, but it helps with the problem you described. Thought you may have missed it… I did till recently.

  4. Gus

    Do you think Friendfeed is iPhone friendly?.

    1. fredwilson

      I have no idea since I don’t use one. Does anyone else know?Fred

      1. Louis Gray

        I read FriendFeed via iPod Touch frequently, and I have no complaints. It’s not optimized for it, but it certainly works. I’ve made comments and “Liked” items via iPod Touch several times. iPod Touch and iPhone share the same interface, so it should be the same there as well.

        1. davidblack

          Yes, the ‘minimalist’ FriendFeed layout works pretty well on iPhone.

  5. Bret Taylor

    Thanks for the thoughtful comments. Wanted to let you know we all read them here at FriendFeed, and I agree with you on almost every single request.

    1. fredwilson

      WowThe tricky one is letting people read directly in friendfeed. Publishers/bloggers want the page views and click thrus (I don’t care myself)So you’ll have to tread carefully there but I know your users will love not having to click thru and backFred

  6. kskobac

    A big change that I think needs to be done on FriendFeed concerns how they import content from Del.icio.us ; whenever you have “notes” filled out as description for a Del.icio.us bookmark, it imports to FriendFeed as a comment. Now when you use FriendFeed and filter to “comments” it shows me the hundreds of descriptions you have for Del.icio.us tags, which is somewhat irrelevant and keeps from being able to easily see the general discussion around the content element itself.

  7. davidblack

    Good suggestions. I want to be able to add friends to groups, and have the option to use these groups to filter the stream – so I could scan through work-related posts separately from post from close friends, for example.

    1. isayusay

      Thanks for your idea. We’ll add the features to post media buzz by groups in layers and to sort media buzz by friends after we launch the friend remix feature in the upcoming release on isayusy.

  8. awilensky

    It’s too much Fru-Fru. Too many services, too many aggregators, too many ways to receive inconsequential comments. What I want:A more elegant way to pull it all together , not many ways to fragment it. Someone smarter than I must have an idea. The best service would one that flattens the inbound conversation, and allows one to direct the outbound messages.

    1. Scabr

      Nice program.What about Twitter to do?:)

      1. fredwilson

        Not sure I understand your question

    2. gregory

      should work like the mind works at a party, listen to who i want, and block out the rest, then shift to another group… hard, eh?i don’t want to have to do anything more than choose which (set of feeds) party i am going to that night, and have the rest be pure discoverymaybe in about xx years

  9. jackson

    What if……….

    1. fredwilson

      Inside joke. Nice

  10. andersondb8

    I was working on a list just like this, I think you covered everything I thought of and more. I just hope we could get a few of these soon. Maybe a third party when the api is released.

  11. Bob Caswell

    I concur. If the majority of your list was implemented, FriendFeed would move from “cute” to “useful” in my book.

  12. Sahil Desai

    All of these are awesome ideas but the one thing that I really really want is to be able to add my own type of feed (eg. I’d love for my Disqus comments to show up). With regard to the 10 things you brought up I completely agree! I started using FriendFeed way back before it was even public and could never really bring myself to get into it, mostly because no one else I knew was on there. Now that it’s getting more publicity I’m liking the direction.

  13. Scabr

    Sorry…I’m waiting your future “Ten Things I’d Like Twitter To Do” 🙂

    1. fredwilson

      Oh, that list is about 100 long but fortunately many third party services are doing them nowFred

  14. daryn

    I got my first friendfeed comment (that I’ve noticed) today, and really would like to second #6 (comments posted back to blog/flickr/comment system)I signed up for friendfeed awhile back, but hadn’t really given it much thought. However, I think many of the items on your “ten things” list really rings true for any aggregating service, or any service with overlapping features.For these two in particular, I wonder if AdaptiveBlue’s SmartLinks can at least be part of the answer…- If you’re going to have an MP3 link on your site, show a player. – If you’re linking to a photo/photo page, show a preview.I’d love to see a “Best Practices for Social Media” post. I suppose a wiki entry would make the most sense 🙂

  15. f

    22