Putting Friendfeed on a Diet

Image via CrunchBase

When friendfeed rolled out their changes a couple weeks ago, I was interested but skeptical.

Perhaps I’m one of the few, but I really liked friendfeed like it was before. Not having everything post in real time meant that I didn’t get 4 copies of the same post from the same person because they really liked their discovery and shared it all over the web.

One thing that I did like was the fact that I could now add my twitter friends to my follow list.

With 50 or so friends, it was easy to brush off a few multiposts (while muttering under my breath about sites that make changes without thinking about the implications).

Perhaps I should have thought of that before I added my twitter friends, but all I was considering was finally being able to “like” or “comment” on someone’s tweets without having to retweet so people would know what I was talking about. In a matter of minutes, my friendfeed list grew almost 10x as big as it had been before…from around 50 to close to 500!

I had thought multiposts were bad when I was following 50 people!

So, my goal for today was to make friendfeed useful again. I’m doing that by using one of the same methods I’ve been using with Twitter – creating groups.

Friendfeed makes it easy to sort friends by groups. Besides asking what group you want a friend in when you first add them, if you click on “Browse/edit friends” (at the bottom of the Friends box to the right on your friendfeed page) you can hover over anyone that you follow and a box will pop up with the option to edit the group(s) that friend is in.

Clicking on edit will allow you to choose from a list of groups. Home feed, Favorites, Personal, and Professional are the premade ones, but it’s easy to add another if none of those are exactly what you want.

If you don’t want to see some feeds when you first open friendfeed, simply unclick “Home feed”. This way, you can see the posts that are important to you first, without your home page being overrun by multiposts.

I’m curious. What do you think of the new friendfeed changes? Is it easier to use now or do you wish they’d go back to the old style? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.