FriendFeed gets a new Twitter-like look

FriendFeed, a social network aggregator, has unveiled a new look which appears to be distinctly Twitter inspired compared to its last incarnation.

With FriendFeed, you can see the activity of your friends across many different sites - such as Twitter, Flickr or Facebook - effectively giving you a one stop shop for what your friends are up to.

In addition to just consuming your friends' updates, you can also comment on their activity or even post your own material directly to the site.

Brand new you

The new look design puts an update box top left, with your contacts' activity listed below. Over on the right, in a thinner column, is your profile image and name with links to various settings and features below.

One thing that FriendFeed does, than neither Twitter nor the recently re-designed Facebook do, is real time refresh. There's no need to manually reload the page to see new activity - it streams in automatically at the top.

Facebook is planning to add this further down the line, whereas it's possible to achieve the same effect on Twitter by using a third party client.

You can also see comments by other users as they happen and write responses back in real time too.

To help you keep on top of all the updates, FriendFeed offers groups and filters, so you can keep your friends in check. It also lets you keep up the facade of reciprocal friendship by letting it appear you follow someone's updates but without the hassle of actually having to read them all.

Availability

In order to avoid user revolt, the new design is currently opt in only - if you've already got a FriendFeed account simply point your browser at beta.friendfeed.com to see it in action.

FriendFeed