Evan Sims

FriendFeed “Neo” released

It should come as no surprise to any of you that I really, really like FriendFeed, given the things I’ve done with the API and the unholy amount of time I spend browsing, commenting and liking people’s stuff. However, I’ve had a hard time converting most of my friends into “true believers” and using the service. I know it’s not for everyone, but the potential value of the service to some users seems to get lost in the UI. Me? I love it. It’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s precisely what I need and nothing I don’t. But, again, it’s not for everyone.

The biggest complaint I get? Hard on the eyes. No, not the design. But the color scheme. Black on white isn’t the best pallet choice when you’re potentially spending hours browsing pages. Thus, my theme FriendFeed Neo was built. It inverses the scheme, placing white text on a black background. It also softens the blues, removes the rounded edges and does nifty little things like highlight friend’s comments in threads to make them more noticeable.

I have more plans for the theme, but for now I’m releasing it so I can start getting feedback. So, please, give it a try and let me know what you think- preferably in the evansims.com room on FF or here in my blog comments.

Grab it at Userstyles.org

Thanks!

FriendFeed is not an alternative to Twitter. Get over it.

This week all I seem to be hearing is people wanting to describe FriendFeed as some sort of reasonable alternative to Twitter. It isn’t. I love FriendFeed to death, perhaps even moreso than I do Twitter these days, but it wasn’t designed to be a messaging system or to compete with Twitter; it was designed to be precisely what it is: a lifestream aggregator with social elements. And it does it amazingly well.

I think people enjoy FriendFeed so much for what it is, they want to pretend it’s suitable to fulfill this gaping void Twitter’s constant issues has created. But FriendFeed isn’t suitable for this kind of stuff. It lacks the IM, the SMS, the email and, frankly, the structure of the site doesn’t lend itself to conversations terribly well. It’s great for commenting or brief discussions, but if you try to follow a thread of replies to something Scoble says, it’s truly difficult.

Could FriendFeed be a Twitter competitor? Sure. Everyone could be if they put the time and money into retrofitting the system to do it. But I don’t think that’s honestly what FriendFeed wants to be. I know it isn’t what I want them to be.

Web 2.0 is all about doing one thing and doing it right; FriendFeed is already there as a product (with the exception that it needs a much broader range of service support, like profilactic does.) Twitter needs a lot of work, but in the mean time there’s sites like Jaiku, Pownce and a new one I’ve been playing with today called Plurk. They all do a much better job of microblogging because that’s what they were designed from the ground up to do.

I understand the sentiment, everyone, but I think you’re barking up the wrong tree wanting FriendFeed to be something it isn’t.

FriendFeed Activity Widget Released

The FriendFeed Activity Widget is a simple WordPress widget plugin that pulls your FriendFeed stream, pretties it up a bit and shares it with visitors to your blog. It’s essentially a lifestream plugin that requires just a few steps to set up.

Give it a look.