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FriendFeed features that Facebook needs to absorb

Monday's news that social giant Facebook is acquiring the less than two-year old FriendFeed included an important postscript: "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product." But for FriendFeed users, the future seems unclear. Will development on the service be discontinued as the now Facebook-employed FriendFeed creators have been tapped to work on a bigger, and more popular social-networking site? Probably.

What is likely to happen is that many of FriendFeed's killer features become features on Facebook, with FriendFeed eventually shutting its doors to focus on Facebook development. So what are those FriendFeed features Facebook doesn't have, or that FriendFeed simply does better?

Search: One of the most important features FriendFeed has (that Facebook doesn't) is a really solid search engine. On FriendFeed you can search for content from your friends, or the entire world. The best part is, you can save any search you've made and keep an eye on it for updates. Facebook's search is currently focused more on finding people, along with navigating to various parts of its site like events, pages, and applications. Update: Scratch this one off the list. Hours after this post went live, Facebook began pushing an updated version of its search engine that indexes updates and other content. At least for the past 30 days, which is a good start.

Real real time. FriendFeed's real time is a constant flow of information that comes in as soon as the service can get it to you. On Facebook, you get a little reminder to refresh the stream when there are updates. FriendFeed's way of letting users avoid an overload is to simply put the stream on pause--something Facebook could soon adopt.

Content aggregation. Facebook's "highlights" section of its home page does its best to show you new or otherwise interesting things from your friends if they've liked something. It feels like an afterthought though. FriendFeed's solution is to create a "best of the day" which shows the most popular and fresh content that your friends like. It can also be filtered by day, week and month, which lets you get a quick digest of content without having to keep your eyeballs glued to the news feed.

IM integration. I've knocked this feature in the past for being noisy, but… Read more

Simple handwriting reader

Define your personality through your handwriting style with this simple program that doesn't even require you to write a word. With extensive questioning and great flow, this program might just nail your personality.

The program's interface is fantastically simple. Users must only click on radio buttons and a few other excellently labeled buttons to take this test and learn about themselves. The program does provide an online Help file, though it is so basic user might be better off just experimenting. Learning about your handwriting style was surprisingly simple and effective. Users cycle through more than 15 questions … Read more

More iPhone OS 3.1 beta improvements discovered

Apple's iPhone OS 3.1 beta 3 introduces new features that are subtle, but interesting. Our readers have discovered a handful of these and passed them along to us. Check them out below.

A counter for tethered data appears alongside cellular data usage in the network settings.

A new, improved security feature for pass-locked phones prompts for a PIN the first time an iPhone is attached to a new computer for syncing. The phone won't connect without the PIN being entered first. iTunes already had this feature, but the protective measure now works in more apps, including PhoneView. … Read more

iPhone OS 3.1 adds video editing and Voice Control options

Thanks to a few iPhone Atlas readers, we've learned of some of the new features in the beta release of iPhone OS 3.1. Though the changes are fairly substantial, we don't know if they'll be included in the software's final release. Here's what we've heard so far.

After editing a video on the iPhone 3GS, you have the option of saving your edited clip as a new file or replacing your original video. Though no AT&T support is evident, MMS is now enabled on the phone as a default setting. The … Read more

Facebook's load balancing act by the numbers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--At the O'Reilly Velocity conference here, Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's vice president of technical operations, highlighted some numbers from the social network's latest feature launches.

The site has more than 200 million users, and continues to grow. Heiliger and the rest of his team have had to make sure it can accommodate that growth while managing to keep newly launched features from breaking it. And so far it's worked.

In the last four months, live events like the U.S. presidential inauguration, the NBA finals, and this month's land grab for user names … Read more

Is Apple behind the laptop curve?

As we all know, Microsoft has been running its Laptop Hunters series of ads knocking Apple for the high price of its laptops and the features you get for the money. Our laptop editor, Dan Ackerman, regularly gives high marks to Apple's wares, and the company's 13-inch MacBook sits at the top of our Best 5 laptops list. In short, we're pretty happy with what Apple has to offer. But as good as its laptops are, Windows-based PCs do have a few leading-edge features not found in MacBooks.

Here's the list we came up with:

Blu-ray: … Read more

Confusion is the theme

Although it's touted as a program launcher, we found this free program to be more of a way to group programs and other items in one place on the desktop. Toolbox isn't for the novice, though, if only because of the knowledge required to understand all of its settings and options.

Toolbox has a busy user interface that features menu options at the top of a small window, and two tabs--one for creating toolboxes and another for application settings. You can go the easy route and add a desktop Toolbox with preset components like My Computer and the … Read more

What does Hulu offer that YouTube doesn't?

When it comes to offering full-length content on the Web, YouTube isn't ready to yield to Hulu.

On Thursday, the San Bruno, Calif.-based video site of Google announced that it had reached agreement with notable entertainment companies, including Sony Pictures, Lions Gate Entertainment, and CBS (publisher of CNET News) to offer visitors full-length TV shows and feature films.

What this means is that YouTube wants to become a one-stop shop for everything video.

The strategy seems obvious. YouTube already has more than 100 million people visiting every month to watch a mixture of short clips created by amateurs … Read more

Facebook readies new user pages, filtering tools

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook on Wednesday announced major changes to the ways users could filter information, along with an overhaul to its pages feature.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg started out a morning presentation here by noting that one of the biggest trends in social networking is organizing streams of information. Sites like Twitter and MySpace were making strides in helping to organize these streams, and Facebook needs to do a better job at it, he said.

"We're at a point now of expecting this information sharing to keep moving faster and faster," he said. "Today we'… Read more