Thanks for the great post !

I’m starting to find that looking at other people’s feeds and seeing what they’re sharing, and commenting on them, is becoming really appealing. So even if you sign up and don’t share too much stuff on your own feed, you may still enjoy it. That actually may be an eventual solution to my first challenge I see. It’s possible that if enough data crazed early adopters come on board, being a lurker would be appealing.

Basically the site is being created by a bunch of ex Googlers so it has that fast, clean, no-nonsense feel of GMail, and it’s early enough in the adoption phase so it isn’t overrun with trolls or spammers (that may change). It’s in a sweet spot right now.

http://friendfeed.com/embed

I don’t see any info about styling it, but if that’s possible…I’d be delighted. The FriendFeed colors don’t exactly fit in with a lot of pages, and IMHO the logo’s a bit big. And again, they could use feed item separators. I’m no designer, but it’s difficult to look at those items, and thus, use FriendFeed. My eyes just wander past everything.

Otherwise, they got a whole lot *right*, and I’m excited to use it! Once I figure out how I want to fit it into my stuff, I’m going to give the embed code a spin. I don’t want to seem like all I do is complain, but I’m so impressed with how much they got right, that I’d like them to give the rest some attention. Sort of like Apple — sometimes it’s easy to criticize them, but it’s because they did so many things right — we want Apple to smooth out the rough edges. For purely selfish reasons, of course — we want to use their stuff!

Thanks for the heads-up, and thanks for subscribing to my feed, dude.

It seems they do make it possible to embed your feed on another page, so I’ll probably look into doing that (and maybe more, but this is a nice start). I like the idea of a page that writes itself.

I wish they’d make it easier to tell what kind of features are available — after not finding the embed function, I was goofing around and hit the ‘About’ page to see a link about embedding. That would be more useful in a couple of other places, IMHO.

A couple more observations:

1. Would be nice to have lines separating items in the feed. It’s hard to read past a certain point.
2. I’d like a preference (or separate pages) to read stuff my friends are doing. It’s an interesting idea to see what friends of my friends are doing, but I don’t always care.

I like it, though…it’s like what I was trying to do with Facebook, but a lot more open. Before trying to do this sort of thing with Facebook, I also attempted to do this with sidebars in my blog, but it never worked like I had hoped. This is the real deal.

I could be convinced to dump the Facebook mini-feed for this, though I’d need to find a way to still have Facebook updates go to my FriendFeed (but only on Facebook, since the outside world cannot see the Facebook-specific stuff). Hmm.

Thanks for the heads-up, and thanks for subscribing to my feed, dude.

It seems they do make it possible to embed your feed on another page, so I’ll probably look into doing that (and maybe more, but this is a nice start). I like the idea of a page that writes itself.

I wish they’d make it easier to tell what kind of features are available — after not finding the embed function, I was goofing around and hit the ‘About’ page to see a link about embedding. That would be more useful in a couple of other places, IMHO.

A couple more observations:

1. Would be nice to have lines separating items in the feed. It’s hard to read past a certain point.
2. I’d like a preference (or separate pages) to read stuff my friends are doing. It’s an interesting idea to see what friends of my friends are doing, but I don’t always care.

I like it, though…it’s like what I was trying to do with Facebook, but a lot more open. Before trying to do this sort of thing with Facebook, I also attempted to do this with sidebars in my blog, but it never worked like I had hoped. This is the real deal.

I could be convinced to dump the Facebook mini-feed for this, though I’d need to find a way to still have Facebook updates go to my FriendFeed (but only on Facebook, since the outside world cannot see the Facebook-specific stuff). Hmm.