Twitter and Jaiku—these two similar services were battling it out for mini-blogging supremacy during a time when the average person had little to no knowledge of what mini-blogging was. Twitter came out on top, but don’t think for a second that it was because Twitter was better. Instead, it was a result of Twitter’s open API which allowed mind-blowing third-party products and services to be created. These third-party products and services have, in many respects, done phenomenally well for Twitter, but now there is a new player in town wanting to earn the respect of similar third-party developers.

In April of 2008, Twhirl’s developers had aspirations to implement FriendFeed support within the client. Now a Seesmic owned product, Twhirl is currently one of the best FriendFeed clients available today, but it is far from perfect. It’s the small things that are holding the client back from reaching its full potential. However, I will use it as a comparison for the rest of this article.

I am constantly questioning if an amazing—dare I say ultimate—FriendFeed client could propel the FriendFeed service to fame. Third-party developers have done this with Twitter, and I believe it could be done again with FriendFeed.

However, if we are to be blessed with such a great FriendFeed client, it will require a few kick-ass features.

The Ultimate Features

Interface

First and foremost, the ultimate FriendFeed client should have a simple and intuitive interface design. Emphasis should be on displaying information that a user wants to see. Having all the bells and whistles is nice, but I want a client that will give me only the relevant information. It has to be, especially when considering how much information FriendFeed can throw around. A cluttered experience—which is exactly what Twhirl can be at times—will not cut it. I am looking at Twhirl right now, and the scroll bar on my FriendFeed account is very small. It is actually difficult to move up and down the Twhirl client at this point. A page or two could have been nice, or perhaps having the client expand to older entries when you reach the end of the content, similar to Google Reader. Of course, I could simply hit the clear button, but then I might miss important information from one of my friends that I have not read yet.

The interface should allow users to properly and intuitively manage, display, and sort comments. This comment functionality is what put FriendFeed in a league of its own.[2. Ironically enough, Jaiku was, from my knowledge, the first service of its kind to provide a comment thread system (a single level, like FriendFeed) for individual entries.] Currently, the methods used to navigate comments are somewhat disappointing. For example, Twhirl displays comments in a reverse chronological order while the FriendFeed site displays them in chronological order—that makes little to no sense whatsoever. However, I do like how Twhirl hides excess comments from the client, which, of course, can be expanded to view the whole picture. Hopefully this would be a feature in the ultimate FriendFeed client.

Navigation

Navigation is also a prevalent problem because of the amount of information users must sort through. Right now, it is a pain in the ass to catch up with what I have missed. Too many clicks, too much scrolling, too many clicks again, and then a lot more scrolling thereafter. It is fairly repetitive and annoying. FriendFeed’s complexity shows its true colors in these regards.[3. At the time of this writing, I am friends with 46 people on Twitter and 22 people on FriendFeed. I have no issues with using Twitter. I must admit that FriendFeed presents me with at least 10 times more information, but it shouldn't require as much of an effort to keep up the the activity.]

Perhaps third-party developers should attempt to integrate more tabs and/or filters within a FriendFeed client. Why not have tabs or filters for each of the following: blogging activity, news activity, social networking activity, multimedia activity, shopping activity, comment activity, and more. With this in place, users could easily find relevant information without having to sort through the vast amounts of activity generated by other actions. These tabs or filters could—optionally—bypass the “hide” functionality so that users could still see activity within the various categories without cluttering up their “friends” tab as well.[1. I do realize that most of the current FriendFeed clients have ways to activate filters by the types of content like blog posts, Twitter posts, etc., but there are too many related issues with most of these clients to point that out as a nice feature. The ability to sort and filter through content is what needs to be focused on.]

Ease of Use

Unfortunately, people, in general, are dumb. Okay, so, everybody isn’t dumb, but for the most part, many people lack common sense.[4. This leads me to believe that most people are—well, what else?—dumb. Thankfully, my readers are brilliant.] They see something like Twitter or FriendFeed and believe it is pointless, without even giving it a chance. Well, for those who thought Twitter was bad enough, those very same people are going to flip once they see FriendFeed taking over. Of course, many of these same people have never bothered with a third-party client made for these types of services, which is where Twitter really shines, but these people can’t be ignored. A company will need to reach out to these people.

I don’t have any particular suggestions for the ease-of-use department, but I would say that a client that has a built-in mini-tutorial would help a lot of users who have never experienced a social networking service like FriendFeed or Twitter before.

Functionality

Most importantly, the ultimate FriendFeed client will need to have some excellent functionality in order to beat the competition.

One of the most useful features of FriendFeed is the “hide” function. With it, users can easily ignore content. Unfortunately, this feature is only accessible on FriendFeed’s web interface. Obviously, that will have to change. The ultimate FriendFeed client can resolve this issue by allowing users to easily hide any type of content created by any person with a single click. Additionally, the ability to modify the settings of the hide function is also, in my opinion, a requirement to make tat functionality truly useful.

Commenting, by far, is one of the best features of the FriendFeed service. With that in mind, the ultimate FriendFeed client needs to put emphasis on easily creating, editing, and reading these comments. This is where some crazy ideas could really make a difference. Simple things like highlighting a friend’s comment is very useful. Again, it is the small things that can make a big difference.

Finally, the person or people who decide to make the ultimate FriendFeed client should find ways to extend FriendFeed’s uses. Honestly now, who knew that Twitter was going to be a popular service to track packages and calculate MPG rates? Who knew that it would turn the everyday person into a reporter? Who knew that it would be one of the most dominant marketing tools today? Who knew that it would change the world? FriendFeed’s third-party developers should apply all this knowledge to their creations.

If a third-party developer could find ways to implement some, if not all, of the aforementioned features, that developer will have fair advantage over the competition. I believe these to be some great ways to improve a user’s experiences with FriendFeed.

If the people who run FriendFeed are smart, they will quickly make even more efforts towards providing third-party developers with all the tools and knowledge they need to create spectacular applications for the service. It would be a smart business move.

A Question of Time

When will we have this ultimate FriendFeed client? Well, for FriendFeed’s sake, I hope it will be soon. During the golden age of internet applications and services, one days something is hot, and the next day it is not. The FriendFeed service has an unlimited growth potential, but if it is going to overtake Twitter’s dominance, third-party developers need to push the limits of the FriendFeed API right now.