I ‘m a big fan of Friendfeed “ it is my favorite ‘social ‘ site (that term doesn ‘t do it justice) and I spend a fair amount of time with it daily. A good percentage of that time is spent via the iPhone “ so a good FriendFeed app is a good fiend of mine 🙂
Friendfeed ‘s own iPhone optimized site is a good option in its own right and there are several others as well, but for a fair while now I ‘ve been finding that BuddyFeed is my favorite way to work with Friendfeed on the iPhone.
Today BuddyFeed has had a major update “ to Version 2.0 “ which I ‘ve been beta testing for a few weeks now, so this seems an excellent time to finally review this app
What Does It Do?
BuddyFeed is an iPhone Friendfeed client app “ so it allows you to access your Friendfeed account and interact with Friendfeed in nearly all the ways you ‘re accustomed to on a desktop browser or dedicated Friendfeed app.
For any of you who haven ‘t yet discovered Friendfeed, here ‘s a good Intro page for them “ and here ‘s a little slice from it:
FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.
It has hooks into Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Last.fm, Pandora, YouTube, Flickr, and tons more social services “ so you can set it to automatically pull all the messages and content you put up on any of those, straight into your ‘feed ‘ on Friendfeed. Very powerful, and it offers real-time updates, and threaded conversations “ so it is a great spot for conversation on all sorts of topics “ from LOL Cats to iPhone related subjects to anything you can think of.
Here are some of BuddyFeed ‘s features:
- View your feeds of home, lists, rooms, and everyone
- View your own feed, likes, and commented messages
- Inline web browser for links in messages
- View comments and likes of messages
- View user profiles and feeds
- Search in your feeds
- Search in all public feeds
- Post messages (including posting to a room)
- Post images in messages
- Like / unlike messages
- Hide / unhide messages
- Subscribe / unsubscribe to a user
- Safari bookmarklet for posting messages
That ‘s a very strong set of features. I very rarely find situations where I ‘m using BuddyFeed and have to switch over to my laptop in order to do anything “ in fact, I can ‘t think of the last time I ‘ve ever had to do that.
What Does It Do Well?
As shown in the feature list above, it gives you a powerful iPhone Friendfeed client that lets you interact with FF in nearly all the ways you ‘re used to doing on a desktop app or browser.
Its user interface makes it easy to navigate around your most commonly visited areas. For me, the key areas I go to most often are “ the main feed that shows feed entries from people I subscribe to (and their friends) and rooms I subscribe to, my Comments and Likes pages (showing entries I ‘ve commented on or liked), and my favorite rooms (iPhone and Sports Talk 2.0 are my Top Two right now). There is easy access to, and good views for, each of these in BuddyFeed.
Here ‘s the main feed
And an individual feed item I ‘ve just added a Like to
My Comments screen “ showing posts I ‘ve commented on
And the Sports Tal 2.0 room
Navigation is easy within the app “ everything you need is available via the bottom nav bar. The Home button shows your main feed, with a nice summary view of each item, including graphics if the item has any.
The Lists button takes you to a screen where any lists you ‘ve created will show up. Everyone shows everyone ‘s feed “ as you can see in the screencaps, I ‘ve replaced that with the Comments view in the nav bar, which you can of course customize to include links to your favorite areas.
The Rooms button gives you a listing of all the rooms you ‘re a member of
It ‘s got a good inline browser for displaying pages linked in feed entries etc.
It ‘s fast “ to load views, switch screens and in carrying out actions like liking an entry or adding a comment to one “ and very comfortable to work with. It just feels like Friendfeed to me by now.
What ‘s Not So Good?
It doesn ‘t have links to the Best of Day feed, which shows the most liked / commented items from everyone you subscribe to (your friends) during a given day. This needs to be added.
It would be nice to be able to add entries for individual rooms to the bottom bar icons.
I ‘d also like to see the ability to email an item added to the app. I ‘m used to being able to do this with individual tweets within iPhone Twitter apps and would like to be able to do the same with FF feed items.
For some people, another drawback may be that it does not do real-time updates. I don ‘t mind this at all, as I keep those paused a good deal of the time in my laptop browser, and I have heard it causes major battery strain when using Friendfeed in Safari.
Overall
As I said at the top of this post, a good Friendfeed app is a good friend of mine “ as I love spending time at Friendfeed. Well, BuddyFeed has become a very close friend buddy over recent months.
Its brand new 2.0 version is a strong update, with a much slicker UI and more stability.
If you ‘re a fan of Friendfeed and you ‘ve got an iPhone, BuddyFeed is a very strong option to look at.
You can find BuddyFeed in the App Store now, priced at $2.99.
Continue reading:
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TAGS: BuddyFeed, friendfeed, iphone apps, iPhone Friendfeed apps
