I have recently come to really like FriendFeed. If you have not heard about FriendFeed yet (your cave must have been quite cozy!), it is a social aggregator that combines content from sources like Twitter, Blogs, and StumbleUpon. It is often being portrayed as a competitor to Twitter (as in the image), even though Twitter is a major source of content for FriendFeed. You can take a look at my FriendFeed to get a picture. After using FriendFeed for abot a month now, I am quite impressed with how well the service works. However, there are still a few things I feel it's missing.

Refresh feeds quicker or create an easier way for users to
On FriendFeed, some content sources that it aggregates come up in the feed almost instantly, such as Google Talk and Twitter. Most of the other services can take well over ten minutes. It is possible to go in and manually refresh a feed, but doing this is not all that quick. It would be nice if all services could quickly go into FriendFeed so people can go ahead and see your content quicker. It would even be nice if there was a "refresh all" button for your content sources.

Update: FriendFeed Refresh All for Greasemonkey is worth a look to do what I described.

Split up images into seperate items
On almost all content on FriendFeed, it is possible to seperately comment and like individual items. However, on images from such sites as Flickr, images always come in clumps, as in the example below.

It was actually pointed out in the comments of this "block" that this was needed. Check out how FriendFeed deals with other content, such as Twitter.

Some are hidden, which can be viewed at the click of a link. All of the tweets can be liked and discussed individually. It needs to be this way universally.

Allow using images for more content types
FriendFeed looks pretty bland as far as the content goes. Most content does not have any form of illustration. FriendFeed needs to either add screenshots of websites for content that is linking to other sites or allow users to select an image off of the page to serve as illustration, such as Mixx does. So far, the latter is only possible with the bookmarklet, as shown below. This really adds to the link, but it should be possible with more content sources.

Use Cleaner FriendFeed as the default theme
FriendFeed user AJ Batac created a User script for Stylish and Greasemonkey that gives FriendFeed a better interface: Cleaner FriendFeed. Cleaner FriendFeed makes the FriendFeed experience much better. Unfortunately, by the nature of the script, you see the original FriendFeed layout and then this improved one. The script is already quite popular and FriendFeed would satisfy much of the community by integrating into their design.

Add more services in a timely manner!
FriendFeed has yet to add any new services to the list of those that you can aggregrate from since I joined. A lot of new services have been created that should probably be added, such as identi.ca, and many services that have been out for some time probably need to be added. Many users have simply been using RSS feeds to add content from sites that FriendFeed does not yet support, but this skews statistics, confuses on wording (bookmarking a page or posting an article?), and makes it harder for users to block types of content. It seems like a quick deal to add a service to FriendFeed.

At a glance, these look like blog posts. In reality, they are simply posts on a microblogging service. A lot of confusion would be eliminated if FriendFeed simply added a few more services.

I really like FriendFeed. I hope that it continues to improve with time and doesn't go the way so many other social networking sites have. I use the site daily and impressed with how well it works. I invite you to try it out if you haven't already, and add me to your friends when you do.