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Yet Another 16 Ways to Make FriendFeed Even Better List, Whew

Image by Thomas Hawk

Ok, so Jeremy Toeman’s excellent post about 16 ways to make FriendFeed better from yesterday has inspired me to make a list of my own. I’m going to try to keep these as short as I can because, well, I’ve got to get back to FriendFeed to hang out some more. Some of these may overlap a bit with Jeremy’s. If you want to find me on FriendFeed you can find me here.

1. Develop profile pages. Yes, profile pages are already there on the various services that FriendFeed aggregates, but it would be nice to actually have a place on FriendFeed where people could enter their profile data about themselves, links to other social networks not yet covered by FriendFeed, etc.

2. Learn my preferences from my sites. Now this may be Flickr’s fault more than FriendFeed’s, but i find it super annoying that even though I have my Flickr settings set to show me all content (even content Flickr labels 18+) that my contact’s 18+ content is filtered out of my FriendFeed experience. Is this just more censorship BS extending from Flickr or is this FriendFeeds’s fault? I want to see Merkley’s naked people damnit.

3. Develop a mobile version of the site. m.friendfeed on my iPhone would be awesome. As it is now it’s less than optimal on the iPhone and there are a few bugs (like the subscription’s box overlaps the text on the "me" tab). In the meantime Benjamin Golub is working on an interesting new mobile version. Louis Gray has a write up on it here.

4. Auto-reciprocation. Develop an option to allow me to auto-subscribe to everyone who subscribes to me. I like the noise. I can always filter it out after the fact using FriendFeed’s innovative "hide" feature. The bigger the net, the more great conversations and content I come across.

5. Smarten up the recommended list. Right now FriendFeed shows me a pretty static recommended list that does not page. In my opinion FriendFeed should develop an algorithm based on Friends of Friends. The more friends of my friends someone has the higher they should rank. This list should be dynamic and it should page so that I can indefinitely go surfing in there looking for new and interesting people to subscribe to.

6. Expand the stats functionality. Right now FriendFeed shows you the 10 people you find most interesting (based on your likes/comments) and the 10 people who find you most interesting (based on their likes/comments). I think FriendFeed should expand this list to show at least 100 of each. I think they should also have a section that show the top 100 for all time and the top 100 for this week. Having a "this week" option would allow you to better find new FriendFeeders to follow. Did I really just call them FriendFeeders? Yikes.

7. Rich text edit. This could be done by FriendFeed or by someone with greasemonkey. It would be great to be able to bold, italicize, and create links in FriendFeed entries and comments.

8. Auto replacement of imaginary friends. One of the nice things that FriendFeed has right now is the ability to create imaginary friends that you can follow for your friends who are not on FriendFeed yet. The problem is that when your imaginary friend joins FriendFeed you don’t know about it. If you do find them and subscribe, then it posts double entries, one for your newly added actual friend and one for their imaginary clone that you created. It would be nice if FriendFeed could simply auto-add any of your imaginary friends as actual friends when they join and then delete the old imaginary friend from your account.

9. Allow direct posting of mp3s on FriendFeed. Kind of like how Pownce does it. It would be great to share mp3s with friends.

10. Keyword filtering. Would love to be able to have anything with the words Obama or Mahalo filtered out of my FriendFeed experience. This way I could unhide Dave Winer’s and Jason Calacanis’ Twitters again. These two are super insightful but I sometimes get overwhelmed by things that I’m not interested in.

Likewise I’d like to be able to filter in certain keywords even if I’m not subscribed to them. If something mentioned photography, Canon, Netflix, TiVo, etc. It would be nice to see that conversation even if I wasn’t subscribed to that person.

11. Track Flickr groups. I would love it if FriendFeed could inform me anytime one of my contacts started a group conversation thread on Flickr. You can’t do this on Flickr and it would be a *great* way to keep up on the conversations that your friends on Flickr are starting.

12. Direct messaging. It would be nice to have a new tab at the top of my FriendFeed page for direct messages. Right now you have a friend, me, and everyone tab. A fourth tab that allowed people to direct message each other would be nice there as well.

13. A super simple FAQ/guide for the newbie. FriendFeed can feel a little intimidating at first touch. Until you learn how things like "hide" and "filter by service" work, you can feel a little lost. A lot of talk about FriendFeed going mainstream gets bantered about but FriendFeed will have to have a super easy FAQ/guide to get people up to speed on the service. Michael Gartenberg recently joined the site but thinks it’s too complex for many users.

14. Find Friends by geographic region. I’d love it if FriendFeed could show me a list of everyone who is on the site from the San Francisco Bay Area. There’s a strong liklihood that I’d want to follow a lot of these people.

15. Show me the top imaginary friends on the site. If someone goes through the work to set up an imaginary friend, they really have to find value in following that person. These would possibly be some of the most interesting people to follow on FriendFeed. I’ve added about 100 of my favorite photographers on Flickr and Zooomr. I’m sure other people would benefit from also subscribing to them. It would be cool to see a list of recommended imaginary friends just like actual recommended users on the site.

16. Do my chores. Take out the garbage, wash my dishes, make my dinner, babysit my kids, mow my lawn, wash my dog, answer my phone, read and respond to my email, do my work out for me and take my wife out for expensive dinners. If FriendFeed could do all this, well, then I could spend a hell of a lot more time on FriendFeed. Just kidding about the take my wife out for expensive dinners part, of course, I can do that one myself. She’s on FriendFeed now too by the way.

Related posts: 10 FriendFeeds Worth Following, Why FriendFeed Will and Won’t Hit the Mainstream.

The day passed in Soft Silences.

Image by Globetoppers

6WS

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

Image by justmakeit

Yesterday came pretty close to being a perfect day. I went to visit a friend whom I don’t see nearly as often as I’d like. She made us a delicious picnic lunch, which we ate at a nearby Forest Preserve, followed by a lovely walk. That would have been enough, but we went back to her house and sat on the back porch in the sweet air, talking and having fun. And THAT would have been enough, but we decided to play a game of scrabble and sat in the dusk, drinking white wine and clicking our scrabble tiles. Ahhh.