You can now get a daily or weekly email digest for anybody's feed on FriendFeed. You'll get a daily or weekly email with the most popular posts from that person's feed. To get the email, click the "Email/IM" link at the top of anyone's feed, and select the "Best of day" or "Best of week" email option.
Thanks to Kevin for doing a great design for what turned out to be a more complex set of UI options than we had originally anticipated, and thanks to Tudor for implementing the email backend.
- Bret Taylor
I now get the FriendFeed Feedback posts as a Best of Day email so it doesn't fill up my feed, but I don't miss feedback. I also set up a "Best of Day" email for my "Technology people" friend list so I get a pretty good overview of tech news every day via email.
- Bret Taylor
This is a really cool idea Bret, I wish you can make that an RSS feed option as well. I'd be much more likely to read summaries in RSS than in email.
- manielse (Mark Nielsen)
Casey: Thanks for the tip. What's the 7 before the "?" mean in the URL? The number of likes or replies needed to be included?
- manielse (Mark Nielsen)
this is killer, the random influx of email during the day was kinda getting fail-ish. I love the daily digest.
- Drew Lucas
Very cool! Any way to get archives of previous months? (especially helpful for those of us who leave the internet for weeks at a time...)
- Mitchell Tsai
Just curious - at what time of the day will we get these emails ? Midnight US-Time, or will it respect our timezones ?
- Ahsan Ali
Ahsan: it is somewhat random right now when the emails are sent, but we built in the backend capability to control what time they are sent, and we plan on exposing that control to users in the future. Right now, it is kind of random - sorry!
- Bret Taylor
But what exactly is "Best"? Is it anything that has a certain number of likes/comments?
- Laura Norvig
@Bret LOL THAT WAS MY PROJECT! I will release it tomorrow. But you've also did it and killed my friendfeed application **sigh** But mine has multi-reporting weekly-daily-monthly at the same time and adjustable entry count!
- Alp
@Bret please consolidate me or I won't code new apps with you api! :-)
- Alp
Alp: we were not trying to withhold data. Later today the documentation will be updated to reflect the ability to obtain "Best of" for users. The feed id will be USERNAME/summary/N (similar to "Best of" for lists)
- Benjamin Golub
Hi Ben, that is pretty funny, I tried that URL earlier today to see if it has been secretly released :)
- Paul Kinlan
Bret: While Twitter struggle to keep their fail whale under control, you guys are developing stuff like this. Amazing - Thanks!
- Jim Connolly
awesome feature, this will be highly useful for my corporate group ideas / content sharing; projects, etc.... THANK YOU :)
- Susan Beebe
Great work. I especially like that it works on lists too.
- Meryn Stol
my inbox might say different, but I like that :-)
- Dobromir Hadzhiev
Wow, this is really neat! And it links into the idea I expressed earlier, re: reducing signup friction / enabling limited guest privileges. Imagine if I could embed one of my FF rooms on my personal web site, and enable people to subscribe to that feed by e-mail with just a couple of clicks... rather than saying "you can get e-mail notifications but you have to sign up for Friendfeed first." "sign up" -- though admirably lightweight on FF -- is still a huge barrier.
- Adam Lasnik
is there a love button cause I dont like this option I LOVE this option..great work guys
- (jeff)isageek
Three options I would like (1) Can I select "top 100" instead of "top 30"? (2) Could I select both "best of day" and "best of week"? (3) How about older timeperiods? I'd love to get an e-mail with stuff from last week or Mar 2009? Start & end dates? Anything to help me read FriendFeed off-line would be great since I spend long periods off-line at festivals (especially during summer time) or overseas. - Awesome job guys!
- Mitchell Tsai
So this works on groups too, cool! But we still cannot see Best of for groups on the site on friends lists. :-( I have several friends lists that include just groups and when I select to view the best of the page it's empty (even though if I got to the individual best of for those groups there are entries there).
- Kol Tregaskes
does anyone know of a web service that can do this? (I'm thinking weekly email updates of my favorite feeds/people) I don't think there's anything like friendfeed ..
- Friendfeed's Francisco
As cool as that looks, I'm still not convinced that separating science into its own social networks makes any sense. Rather, I would love to see FriendFeed and others recognizing how their tools are used in the sciences and offering new features to encourage that use. To me, part of the power of using FriendFeed and other such tools for science is that they don't put up the kinds of walls that have traditionally existed due to journal subscription fees and whatnot.
- Chris Granade
True about the wall between the general public and scientists. On the other hand, FF seems to stagnate (maybe even decay?) since it was bought by Facebook...
- Björn Brembs
My own take is that hyper-specialized social networks for specific topic areas of science might work well, e.g. a QuantumInformationFeed or a BioInformaticsFeed, because there is a good chance of a person being interested in the majority of posts. Also, such hyper-specialized networks stand a good chance of offering specialized features that are useful, e.g. a good way of citing arXiv...
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- Matt Leifer
The only reason I tend to mind hyper-specialized social networks is that my social interactions are already very fragmented. As you point out though, Matt, one can use open APIs and open source tools in setting up new social networks. Doing so offers a lot of promise of defragmenting social interactions.
- Chris Granade
This is from the same guy that's behind researchgate. This really couldn't be a more blatant knock-off of friendfeed. Can we please have a fresh idea and innovation in this niche?
- Brian Krueger - LabSpaces
ditto Chris - most of the value of an open system like FF is that you get to connect up with people you wouldn't otherwise. For me a system with only chemists wouldn't have critical mass I think. I need contact with life scientists, librarians, computational people and others linked by social network and not discipline
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Absolutely agree JC. Although I'm collecting a long list of places to flee to if FB ever kills FF, in general inward-looking ghettos have no long term viability. Buzz is more likely to succeed than this (and no, I'm not a Buzz fan).
- AJCann
Actually, to me, I think 'science' would be broad enough. Anything not science I can get in the general social circles (and could avoid spamming my non-scientist friends with my science discussions!).
- Björn Brembs
Interesting point Bjorn - I think I would lose some interesting people on OA/copyright if I switched to "science only". People can block you on FF if you are really annoying them with your science talk
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Part of the reason friendfeed works for science has been the people that gathered here ( the UI is also great). I tried sharing the same science related content in facebook but i got a bunch of friends telling me to turn down the gecky stuff :). we need ways to share specific types of content to these different sets of people (friends family work). I currently have facebook for friends...
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- Pedro Beltrao
@Pedro, hypothetical situation: but what if FF (which sadly seems to have stopped developing) or FB implemented a better privacy/filtering system so that your non-science friends could ignore your science posts, and someone implemented an FF/FB app which implemented the data/citation features that @Matt brings up, why wouldn't that be sufficient? Granted its a stretch, but I think @Jean-Claude's point on that the baby you don't want to throw out with the bathwater is openness and a broader audience
- Benjamin Tseng
"This is from the same guy that's behind researchgate" -- that's enough reason for me not to sign up. I never liked the creepy, spammy feel of ResearchGate, and it's been a standard "Facebook for Scientists" failure since its inception. Also, like Jean-Claude, I follow a lot of librarians, copyright experts and similar allies and fellow travelers in the Open Foo arena, many (most?) of whom would not be interested in a science-specific site.
- Bill Hooker
@Benjamin .. this is what I am hoping for. That we might be able to better control who sees what in these networks. This should take away the need for specialize social websites. Facebook might even already have some of this in its new privacy settings.
- Pedro Beltrao
@Pedro, ah, my mistake, I had misinterpreted your comment to mean that you preferred a separate social network rather than implementing features on top of an existing one
- Benjamin Tseng
by the way .. I just signed up to Sciencefeed and it is really a straight up copy of FF. They could have at least tried to make it *look* different.
- Pedro Beltrao
This is the 3rd (or so) discussion on Sciencefeed I've 'liked", logging in late today. A good platform might be able to aggregate these discussions better? A bit of SIOC (http://sioc-project.org/) as I mentioned elsewhere? Are we starting to talk about what we want, what we really really want? (;-)
- Chris Rusbridge
I can't see from Ijad's response in @Martin's article how ScienceFeed differs in an major way from FriendFeed, (the two quoted examples don't sound earth-shattering) except, as @Chris and several others have noted, it's arbitrarily limited to Science. I tend to see FF as essentially a general-purpose feed aggregator and comment system. To my mind the reason it works for science is the...
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- Dan Hagon
BTW, you can control who sees what on Facebook already. Just organize your followers into lists and then you will have the option to share with specific lists when you post something.
- Matt Leifer
I just decided to take my own advice and create a list for my physics friends on Facebook. For the uninitiated, I have to say that it is a bit more of a pain than it could be, but it does work. You can create a list on the main "friends" page. Once you have done that you click on the padlock item below the status update box and choose "customize" from the menu. This allows you to...
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- Matt Leifer
@Neil I think it was a good matchup between a base of users (tech-savvy, Web 2.0-interested) wanting to have a specific type of conversation and a platform which was well-suited for those conversations; I think, however sad this is, it was also a case in that FriendFeed never took off in the same way that YouTube or Twitter or Facebook did -- hence preserving high signal to noise.
- Benjamin Tseng
Technically I cannot find any advantage in comparison to FF. And do I see it correctly that there is no HTTPS for the login?
- Konrad Förstner
@Neil FF was (is) a great platform & the people who I interact with are fantastically helpful, friendly, and obsessed with making science better. If FF dies, something else will do. And if everyone goes there, it will still be great. Like most things, it's the people that matter, and facebook purchasing FF can't destroy that. I don't think we need to pick another place until the official announcement has actually been made. Or until they officially ruin FF.
- Steve Koch
I wrote a long comment that I think my iPhone ate. the gist was, how can you predeclare the users of a social net? orkut was a general social net that ended up being for brazil? what's to say some particular nonscientist community won't adopt sciencefeed? and scifeed didn't on a quick use seem to offer the serendipitous discovery options that FF does.
- Richard Akerman
from BuddyFeed
Y'all do know about the "hide items like this" feature on FF, right? It was introduced with one of my science likes as an example. For whatever reason I haven't gotten complaints about posting science to my feed from my friends or other non-scientific followers on FF. Benjamin, there does exist noise on FF, ask Robert Scoble--he somehow manages to find it (or at least, what he considers noise, judging from his complaints). FF just gives you the tools to painlessly filter it out.
- Ruchira S. Datta
Also, about blatantly copying FF: ...who cares? I took an entrepreneurship course in grad school from David BenDaniel. One of his many pieces of advice was to copy something that works and do it somewhere else. When I think about it, isn't that the point of open science or open anything?
- Steve Koch
One of the reasons I think Neil, Deepak, and myself are so pro-friendfeed is that we were here very early on which meant that we got the benefits of building networks organically and also that the developers were seeing a similar kind of growth to what we saw. I think it is harder for people coming in cold now - which is an interesting problem to try and solve. Eva Amsen's criticisms...
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- Cameron Neylon
@Cameron you may be right. I find lots of scientists here (mainly chemist & bio?) but few others. Some of my digital library/data folk "appear" to be here, that is their tweets & delicious stuff etc turns up, but they don't really have a presence so there's no conversation.
- Chris Rusbridge
Just goes to show that the Friendfeed model has real value. I always thought it would be perfect for those inclined towards collaboration, e.g Scientists
- Mo Kargas
@Steve, because copying for the sake of copying without bringing something new or innovative to the table is not helpful. It's just a money grab.
- Brian Krueger - LabSpaces
Well, presumably they can bring something new to the table, as the founder said on another thread. I don't think it was for the sake of copying, it was for the sake of not reinventing a wheel that works. I have no idea if ScienceFeed will be helpful or survive. But I don't hate people for trying to make money.
- Steve Koch
I think Richard Akerman hit the nail on the head earlier. I don't think (well perhaps in hindsight) there are any predictable sets of rules for social network success. It's a mix of design, early adopters, crossing that threshold. I think Friendfeed had a lot of the technical aspects, good engineering, etc which attracted a kind of user (Neil, myself) that was able to get a community growing.
- Deepak Singh
Thinking through sciencefeed, I actually think a potential direction could be more of an internal information sharing service. I've always wanted access to a service inside my company where we can sort of capture all of our feeds of interest and information, etc. One could put more science specific features in it, and target it that way, but honestly, I don't see how you can make money from it. It either has to be a generalized system or one where friendfeed style info streams are a feature
- Deepak Singh
@Deepak: regarding making money, funding things like FF is one of the places I always thought micropayments could actually work (http://friendfeed.com/thieme...).
- Bill Hooker
Micropayments would work, but not sure how you would make a commercially sustainable standalone product. Part of a portfolio, sure
- Deepak Singh
Looks good to me, this sciencefeed. But I tink there are lots of science rooms here in friendfeed, like science online, science 2.0, etc. etc.
- TrafficBug
34 secs flat for my latest tweet. Thanks Paul and team for this!
- Jorge Escobar
wow, that makes actually want to use Twitter. I may just go tweet something.
- Mike Nencetti
It should be even faster than that Jorge, but our systems are getting near their limit. I hope to have it down to 1 sec sometime next month.
- Paul Buchheit
You are still working on Frienfeed (: how nice !
- mcd
^ That's probably the best part of this announcement, TBH. Good point
- LANjackal
from IM
whoa, it took less than a minute. i accdently tested it but it's great :) thnx
- asli subasi | ☮
awesome, keep it up guys, i knew you would not let us down
- Iggy Mwangi
You didn't break the FF Facebook app while you were at it, did you? It hasn't worked since.
- Tim Tyler
Oh, awesome!!! 12 seconds :) I can finally go back to Twitter (...okay no I can't I've turned into a Friendfeed junkie..) but prior it took hours upon hours for me to see a feed. Dumb I am, I never suspected a problem LMAO.
- Hollywood Amanda
Paul ?? Twitter updates facebook status and then facebook creates a new feed here on friendfeed. So we have same entries both from twitter and facebook on friendfeed. Could you guys please work on how we can avoid duplicate entries? Thank you. ( If there's already a way to avoid this, pls let me know)
- mcd
Cool, thanks, Paul! :-) RT Twitter updates have been missed. :-)
- Kol Tregaskes
And just as I say that, I see my tweets are not coming into FF in real-time. :-(
- Kol Tregaskes
Kol. I just tweeted and it was here before I could get out of Tweetie and launch Safari... It's working :)
- Johnny
from iPhone
Johnny, cool. Just me then. It's still slow. Maybe it's FriendFeed then?
- Kol Tregaskes
It truncates retweets, even in the middle of a link...
- Vezquex
seems that there are only 140chars allowed for a tweet (on FF) and the new twitter retweets are being translated on the way through to old RT @name style - thus are too long.
- guruvan (Rob Nelson)
I photograph Tokyo from fire escapes.The view from a fire escape is different from either the kind of view afforded by obsevation decks constructed at sightseeing spots or the vertical perspective of satellite images that are readily available to anyone with a computer.It's a very personal perspective that I obtain only at the expense of a good... - http://shinsato.cool.ne.jp/twiligh...
I made this small page because I want to know whom I have blocked (I found out I accidentally blocked 5 [edit]). It's simple but you have to risk your Twitter password if you don't know who I am. However you can directly download the JSON or XML via Twitter API. It's not fancy just a practical tool.
- yjl
And I think I might be top 3 of Most Blocking, I have blocked 161 so far. I guess I really enjoy blocking people. ;p
- yjl