jjprojects

My initial impression when I first visited Friendfeed’s new real–time beta was that it was too fast to be able to keep up with the flow of posts. However, after using it for  just few days and getting to know the interface and some of the new features, I think the new version is definitely a step forward. I’m really starting to enjoy it.

It can be fast but it’s become a lot more engaging. No manual refreshing of the content is necessary, that’s great in my book. The more people you are subscribed to, the faster the Home stream content updates. At present, I’m subscribed to over 800 hundred people and that can make the content update pretty fast at times, depending on the time of day. This fast flow of content can be managed with the powerful Filters feature, previously called Lists.

I have a number of filters including one for Friendfeed regulars, those people I subscribe to who regularly comment on and “like” posts. For the time being, I’m keeping these subscribers separate from those who just tend to feed in their content but don’t engage and interact very often with others on the network. I also have a filter for local (to me) subscribers, which I’m hoping will grow over time (hint, hint if you live in Australia or New Zealand) ;). I also have a number of other lists.

You can also manage the fast flow of content by pausing any of your streams for as long as you need to. This is a great feature when you want to read a particular post with a lot of comments (most of Robert Scoble’s posts for instance), or if you want to leave the Friendfeed site for a while to follow a link to a particular blog post.

 I think the “My Discussions” stream has also increased the amount of ongoing conversation. This now contains your own posts as well as posts from other people you’ve commented on or liked, instead of having these as separate streams. It’s good to be able to see these posts all at once, and to see these conversations updating in real-time.

The addition of direct messaging is also a welcome new feature, which I’m sure quite a few people who use Twitter thought was a bit of a stumbling block to starting to interact in Friendfeed regularly. Well, this and the fact that more people are on Twitter, so it’s easier to interact over there.

I’m not one of those in the one-or-the-other camp when it comes to Twitter and Friendfeed. I like using both, they are quite different animals. It should be noted that both have some good real-time features (love Twitter’s real-time search), and I’d say we’re going to see many more instances of real-time action on the web soon enough. I’m all for it

 Feel free to join me on Friendfeed.