FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

Sign up for FriendFeed, invite some friends, and get a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos. FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. FriendFeed makes all the sites you already use a little more social.

It’s also fast and easy to start discussions around shared items. On FriendFeed, you and your friends contribute to a shared stream of information — information that you care about, because it’s from the people that you care about.

You don’t need to install anything to use FriendFeed. But if you already use Facebook, you can add our Facebook application to connect your Facebook profile to all the other products you use around the web. You can also view your FriendFeed in your iGoogle homepage or read it in a feed reader. If you make your FriendFeed publicly visible (kind of like a blog that writes itself), you can embed your feed in your home page or blog.

Let us know what you think in the FriendFeed discussion group or check our our FAQ for more information. You can get continuous updates from the FriendFeed team on the FriendFeed blog.

We are constantly adding new sites. Help us prioritize by suggesting a site. feedback@friendfeed.com

Can I choose who sees my feed? Where else will my feed show up?

You have complete control over who sees your feed. Your FriendFeed is either public or private, and you can change your preferences in your account settings. If your FriendFeed is private, you approve every subscription request for your feed, and your stuff will not be visible to anyone other than your approved friends. If you choose to make your FriendFeed public, anyone can subscribe to you without requiring approval, and your stuff will show up on the FriendFeed homepage.

We really appreciate bug reports. The best place to report the problem is in the FriendFeed discussion group so we can discuss the issue with you and other FriendFeed users. If your problem involves personal information, or you don’t feel comfortable publishing your message to the discussion group, you can email feedback@friendfeed.com.

FriendFeed is service for people to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that their friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

The goal of FriendFeed is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information. You get a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos. And your friends get their customized feeds, full of the cool stuff that you’ve shared.

It’s open: FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, making all the sites you already use a little more social.

It’s flexible: FriendFeed requires as much effort as you want to put in. You can use it just as a way to see what your friends are up to — browsing and reading the stuff they share, or you can actively share your own items and leave comments and have discussions with your friends. There are also lots of ways to access and display your FriendFeed.

And it’s easy to get started: There’s nothing to install, and you can share stuff on your feed as soon as you sign up. Light-weight conversations naturally sprout up around shared items and you can even get introduced to interesting news from friends of your friends.

FriendFeed aggregates all of your activity from the sites you choose using web crawling technologies similar to those used by search engines. For most sites, all you need to provide FriendFeed is your username, and the FriendFeed crawler will automatically find and broadcast all of your public activity on that site. For other sites, or for services that contain private data and require special forms of authentication, FriendFeed takes advantage of the APIs provided by those sites to collect your activity.

By using an automated, crawl-based approach to finding the content you find interesting, our hope is that your FriendFeed experience will be completely “maintenance free” — you can help your friends and family discover what you’re sharing without changing the way you already use your favorite web-based products.

FriendFeed currently supports:

• Amazon.com
• Blog
• del.icio.us
• Digg
• Disqus
• Flickr
• Furl
• Gmail/Google Talk
• Goodreads
• Google Reader
• Google Shared Stuff
• iLike
• Jaiku
• Last.fm
• LibraryThing
• LinkedIn
• Ma.gnolia
• Mixx
• Netflix
• Netvibes
• Pandora
• Picasa Web Albums
• Pownce
• Reddit
• Seesmic
• SlideShare
• SmugMug
• StumbleUpon
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Upcoming
• Vimeo
• Yelp
• YouTube
• Zooomr

Can I keep track of friends that don’t use FriendFeed?

Yes, you can use our “imaginary friends” feature to see what your friends are sharing on some services, even if they aren’t FriendFeed users themselves. For example, if you know your friend’s Flickr username, you can create an imaginary friend with that Flickr account, and every time your friend publishes a photo to a public album, you’ll see it as an entry in your feed.

You can only use FriendFeed’s imaginary friends feature to see the public information your friends share.

We had a “fix-it day” yesterday at FriendFeed, where we fixed bugs and added small features that we have been putting off for too long. New features include:

Mini-profiles – hover over someone’s name on any page to see the services they’re subscribed to and a snapshot of their recent activity.

Flickr favorites – we now pull in your Flickr favorites in addition to the photos you publish on Flickr. Nickname editing – you can now edit your FriendFeed nickname in your account settings so you can change the URL of your FriendFeed more easily. We also fixed a number of bugs, including improving our Netvibes support and fixing a number of iGoogle authentication issues.

Does FriendFeed work with Facebook?

Yes, FriendFeed works with Facebook. You can connect your Facebook account to your FriendFeed account by adding the FriendFeed Facebook application. Your friends will automatically be kept in sync, and you can put your FriendFeed on your profile and in your Facebook mini-feed.

The easiest way to connect your FriendFeed and Facebook accounts is to click the Facebook link on your account settings page.

We are very excited to announce the launch of the FriendFeed API, which enables developers to interact with the FriendFeed site programmatically. It’s designed to make it possible for anyone to improve FriendFeed or integrate FriendFeed into other applications. You can develop a FriendFeed interface for a mobile phone, build a FriendFeed widget for your blog, or develop an application that makes it easy to post photos to your feed from your iPhone.

If you are a developer, you can get started immediately at the FriendFeed API documentaion. We have also released Python and PHP client libraries to make it easier to get up and running.

If you are a non-techie, you can learn more about what the API does and how you will interact with third party FriendFeed applications by reading the FriendFeed API user FAQ.

Since the API is new, it is a work in progress, and we expect to make a number of changes in the next few months. Developers can send us feedback in the FriendFeed developer forum.

We would like to thank the folks who took the time to send us feedback on earlier versions of the API, particularly Benjamin Golub, DeWitt Clinton, Eran Hammer-Lahav, and Dave Winer. We haven’t yet implemented all of their suggestions (OAuth is coming!), but we wanted to get it out to all of you for feedback in the meantime.

We are eager to see all the innovative applications people will create with the API. Happy coding!

!or you Twitter users: When you are commenting on a Twitter post in FriendFeed, you now have the option of sending your comment as an @reply in Twitter as well:

Happy Tweeting!!

We had a “Fix-it Day” at FriendFeed on Friday, which means we spent all our time on the top bugs and feature requests from our discussion group. You can now add these web sites to your FriendFeed:

Disqus Goodreads LibraryThing Seesmic SlideShare

See the complete list of services at the top of your FriendFeed home page.

We also fixed a bunch of bugs, including:

When deleting a photo entry, the entire entry is now deleted instead of just one of the photos. (original thread)

The FriendFeed embed widget now has square corners to work around the background color issues people were having.

Comment links in our emails and Atom feeds now link a permalink that won’t go stale (original thread)

“Unsubscribe” links now only appear in the public feed when you are actually subscribed to the person

We increased the paging limit so you can now page past the 11th page of your feed.

Thanks for the continued bug reports and feedback! You can chat with us and other FriendFeed users in the FriendFeed discussion group.

I am extremely happy to announce that FriendFeed now has search. There is now a search box on the top right of your FriendFeed home page. You can search over all of your friends’ shared items, an individual person’s items, or search all of FriendFeed:

You can also restrict your search to any one of the web sites FriendFeed supports. For example, here is a search for “friendfeed” in your friends’ Twitter messages. While some of the sites we support at FriendFeed have search functionality available, many of them do not, and most do not allow you to restrict your searches to content from your friend network. Our hope is that this new FriendFeed feature will make all the products we support a bit more useful for you.

Search boxes are now available on most pages of the site. If you want to see all of the search options available, check out the advanced search page.

All of the effort for this feature came from Jim Norris, one of the FriendFeed co-founders and one of the smartest guys I know. Since I have have been bugging him about this feature for weeks, he is officially my superhero now. Jim, you rock.