The New FriendFeed Looks A Lot Like Twitter

riendFeed () has rolled out a new optional beta today, featuring a cleaner real-time interface, plus some much requested features like the ability to send people a direct message. My first reaction to it (which you can access at beta.friendfeed.com): it feels a lot like a web-based Twitter () client, with the added goodness of seeing your friend’s activities from the dozens of different services that FriendFeed supports.

Your FriendFeed homepage now includes a box to post an update, with the option to cc it to Twitter. This functionality existed previously, but required you to click Post > Message in the old interface. Below this new update box – much like on Twitter – you see your friend’s most recent activities, with one big difference: they update in real-time on the page, without refreshing. In addition to seeing your friends’ updates stream in, you’ll actually see comments and “likes” as they happen, in real-time.

FriendFeed Beta

The “real-time” aspect combined with the new interface makes FriendFeed move extremely fast, especially if you subscribe to super-sharers. However, FriendFeed’s filtering options are still easily accessible from the new right-hand sidebar, so you can filter to a specific group of friends, or even to an individual user. These features seem like they’ll be more important than ever given the speed at which the real-time feed moves for me - and I only follow a few dozen people.

FriendFeed also has a smart new direct messaging feature, which lets you send a private message to another user. I say “smart” because the feature uses auto-complete, so you can start typing the name of the person you want to send a message to and FriendFeed pulls up the names of the users that you’re likely looking for. This is a welcome improvement over Twitter’s direct messaging system, which uses a pull-down menu and can thus be rather cumbersome when you follow lots of people.

The “Old” FriendFeed

There’s also a little bit of Facebook () baked into the new FriendFeed – most notably, that everything seems bigger. While I dislike this on Facebook – it seems to show me less info when I login – I like it on FriendFeed. Maybe that’s just because there seems to be a lot more interaction with user’s activities on the new FriendFeed than the new Facebook, and hence, more value.

In any event, this looks like a great update for FriendFeed, though, as many will likely conclude, it does make it feel a lot like Twitter, and a bit like Facebook. The phased rollout is something that Facebook could learn from however – as users test the new FriendFeed features in the coming days, FriendFeed will make tweaks based on the feedback. This will likely avoid the same type of huge backlash that ensued yet again on Facebook when the social network released their latest design with no beta period.

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