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FriendFeed Blog

FriendFeed's first yearOctober 1

FriendFeed's turning one! A year ago today, Bret, Jim, Paul and Sanjeev put our site and service out there and invited some folks. Soon, more people joined—as users, coworkers and friends. The rest, as they say, is history. Although not particularly ancient history.

Still, it's hard to believe that it's already been a year. Certainly, it seems like a lot has happened. For those of you who might have missed any of it, here's a quick recap:

2007

October 1 (in the wee hours): Bret and Jim push the site and FriendFeed is born. Sanjeev's daughter, Iris, was born just a few days earlier. Sanjeev has a hard time picking favorites.

October 1: Bret purchases office espresso machine

October 2: Bret purchases office computers

October 15: The crew moves into FriendFeed Global International World Headquarters. Bikes are purchased.

Find activity by url or domain with the FriendFeed APISeptember 29

We have another new API feature to announce today, one that we hope will open up a whole new way of looking into FriendFeed's data.

We've added new methods that allow you to quickly find who has shared a given URL on FriendFeed.

Since a lot of the entries on FriendFeed are references to activities from other websites—ie. photos you've posted, pages you've bookmarked, or videos you've enjoyed—we hope this new feature will make it easier to find discussions about a Last.FM song you like, a YouTube video you made, or perhaps anything recent from your blog or favorite newspaper.

We hope this will help our extremely creative API community build commenting plugins, browser toolbars, and crazy insightful mashups that spot trends, add value back to the original material, or discover new content.

Full technical details about these and other features can be found in the API's documentation: http://code.google.com/p/friendfeed-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation#/api/feed/url_-_Fetch_Entries_about_a_URL

And please swing by the developer forum with comments, concerns, and suggestions about all our API features: http://groups.google.com/group/friendfeed-api

Remember, you can spell "happy" without "api", but only just barely!

Manage subscriptions from the FriendFeed APISeptember 24

Good news today for people who like to use FriendFeed from the comfort of their favorite desktop or mobile client (like twhirl or Alert Thingy)... we've added to our API the ability to subscribe and unsubscribe from friends and rooms.

This means no more having to remember interesting people or rooms you want to add the next time you're on friendfeed.com. Instead, API clients can now support subscribing directly.

Also, to make sure you can keep an eye on what the clients are doing, we've also added a list of subscription modifications (accessible from the bottom of your "Subscriptions" tab):

Every time you subscribe or unsubscribe from a person or room, a new entry will show up in your subscription modifications page so you can undo any mistakes.

I can't wait until fftogo adds these features, which is likely to be very soon because they were built by Ben, its talented creator.

Full technical details about this and other features can be

Goutham's Last DaySeptember 19

Goutham`s summer o' fun as a FrrriendFeed intern has sadly come t' an end. Today be his last tide before settin' sail fer life as a gentleman o' fortune (or be 't a PhD student?).

Goutham be our first ereengineerin' intern, an' applied his AI (Artificial Intelligence) aftground t' some very challengin' problems. O'er th' summer he waded into th' sea o' FrrriendFeed data wi' his machine learnin' skills an' uncovered new ways o' seein' patterns within 't. These new techniques be havin' yet t' be released, but will lead t' improvements in th' relevance o' content in sea dogs an' land lubbers`s feeds. He also found time t' help improve th' FrrriendFeed API.

Goutham, we know ye`ll miss lunchin' at La Fiesta, but nay as much as we`ll miss havin' ye around th' office. (Nor as much as I`ll miss beatin' ye in pin' pong, e'en tho, aye, ye did beat me that one time.)

New FriendFeed design launched... with an exciting new feature!September 18

You might have noticed the new look for FriendFeed. We've been tinkering with a new design for a few weeks, and after spending some time in beta, it's finally ready for primetime.

larger screenshot

One of the things we'd heard most from users is that you wanted to have greater control over what you see in your feed—whether it's separating out your family members' updates from your coworkers' or making sure you don't miss entries from a specific friend.

The new design offers friend lists to help you organize your subscriptions into groups. Now you can get updates from specific groups of people separately, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.

There are lots of other improvements, such as being able to post photos directly to FriendFeed. We've also added a sidebar to improve navigation, making it easy for you to access your Friend lists and custom