In its early days, FriendFeed was known for releasing new features on an almost daily basis. That breakneck speed has slowed now that the lifestreaming and aggregation service has come out of private beta, but sometimes FriendFeed still surprises us with new features and user interface changes. Just a few days ago, we wrote about FriendFeed’s new design, which came out of beta today. More importantly, though, FriendFeed finally solved one of the most annoying aspects of the service: duplicate shares. FriendFeed now groups similar items together, which is a major improvement and reduces the noise on the main feed significantly.
Out of Beta
FriendFeed had tweaked the beta design over the last few weeks and introduced ‘friend lists,’ which allow you to organize your friends into different categories and help you to tone down the noise in your main feed. Today, FriendFeed made this beta interface the default for all users.
You can find our review of FriendFeed’s latest design change here.
Duplicates
Duplicate shares were always the most annoying aspect of FriendFeed. Whenever a story breaks, a large number of your friends are likely to share it through various services, which creates a lot of noise in your main feed. Now, FriendFeed will group these entries together. Your main feed will only show the first share, and then give you the option to click through to see who else shared the same item as well. Hopefully, this will also mean that discussions will now become less fragmented, as users will most likely gravitate towards those items that were shared first.
One really nice aspect of this grouping is that it works across services, so shared items from Google Reader, for example, are grouped with Twitter messages (and it works with tinyurls, too).
A lot of us here at RWW are FriendFeed users (we even set up our own room) and we are happy to see that the company is still working hard on improving its service by listening to its users.
