According to the friendfeed blog yesterday, a new design will be launched in beta mode, to help get feedback from existing members before making it available to the general public. You can play with the new design here. Friendfeed has managed to keep their new design extremely clean, while adding a bunch of new features to make a users experience easier.
One of the new features the beta design includes, is the ability to upload photos with new posts. This will allow members the ability to upload multiple files at the same time, without haveing to intall any plugins. Prior to this you needed to get photos from other sites including flickr. This would signal that they will eventually allow members the option of uploading audio and video in the near future.
Another inclusion to the new beta design is the way groups and subscriptions are handled. In the account settings, a member may now mass subscribe and unsubscribe from other friendfeed members. Prior to this, it could take up half the day trying to subscribe to everyone who subscribed to you. The groups now remind me of Google’s contact manager, giving me the ability make as many groups as I want and decide which friends go into which.
The new ability to see other people’s home feeds is something also included in the new beta design and can be quite helpful if you want to check out others friends and try to get them into your own list. You can do this by seeing your friend’s updates and all of their friend’s postings.
The change that is most noticeable however, is the new sidebar on the right hand side of the new design. It is designed to give you easy one click access to the feeds of the members you care most to read about.
