The Friend Surfer, with knobs on

November 21, 2006

Donncha

Wow, feedback about the Friend Surfer has been very positive with some great ideas which I’ve been working on today:

  1. “Subscribe to blog” is in. Just type the url of a WordPress.com blog into the textbox on the left of the page to subscribe to it and track the posts on it.
  2. If you mark your blog as non-public so it doesn’t show on listings and pages around WordPress.com then it won’t appear when someone adds you as a friend, but someone can still subscribe directly to that blog.
  3. If you mark your blog as private then anyone who has subscribed to it in the past will be kicked off and lose access. It goes without saying, that private blogs can’t be subscribed to in the first place, but if you’re a member of a private blog, you’ll automatically be subscribed to it.

Thanks for all the great feedback, and I hope you find the new features useful!

Later… after much discussion the Friend Surfer just got another face lift. Instead of adding users, you can only add blogs now. It makes things easier to understand because there are now just “Public Blogs” and “Private Blogs”. With knobs on indeed!

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51 Comments

Comments are closed.

  1. Matt Nov 21st at 6:27 pm

    Nice improvements. 🙂

    Like

  2. adam Nov 21st at 6:51 pm

    clever solutions, thank you.

    Like

  3. Sha Nov 21st at 7:01 pm

    Woohoo. Love the new features!

    Like

  4. thefly Nov 21st at 7:10 pm

    Nifty tool , thanks again

    Like

  5. axewielderx Nov 21st at 7:18 pm

    People can already subscribe to blogs, in fact, any rss feed via their browsers.I did not see much use in the friend surfer and I also do not see much use in this.While I appreciate you are working to try improve the user experience here. I have to question what is being done that is useful.

    Like

  6. Maz Nov 21st at 8:34 pm

    cool, I’m loving the friend surfer.

    Like

  7. engtech Nov 21st at 8:36 pm

    Thanks for the update. It’s much nicer this way.

    @axewielderx: there’s been request for more social/community features, and I’m sure this is one of the results.

    Like

  8. scrunchyy Nov 21st at 8:41 pm

    I like the improvements.
    Thank you!!

    Like

  9. foolswisdom Nov 21st at 8:43 pm

    axewielderx, even with it right in all the browsers, I think most people still don’t “get” feeds and feed readers. I can see this being useful though it may be too “walled garden” for some of the audience.

    Like

  10. MadMark Nov 21st at 9:20 pm

    WoOOO HooOOO… i like it!!! i like it!!

    Like

  11. sockrebel Nov 21st at 9:54 pm

    how is this any different than subscribing to the RSS feeds. I thought the point of the Friend Surfer was so that you could read their comments, too.

    Like

  12. ronnydm Nov 22nd at 1:38 am

    very like the improvement…..
    thanks a lot

    Like

  13. Ashish C. Nov 22nd at 4:42 am

    Meow!! I like!!

    Like

  14. Chittaranjan Nov 22nd at 4:59 am

    One downside with FS is that only WP Blogs can be subscribed to whereas RSS readers encompass the whole Gamut of the Blogs out there!

    Is there any way to add Blogs which are hosted outside of WP but still run on WP?

    Like

  15. The Rooster Nov 22nd at 5:19 am

    yeah I would agree in part with that. But then I am a firm believer in making RSS technology more accessible to users. This feature does that. It is seamless and users are subscribing to feeds and they don’t realise that is what they are doing.

    I will stick to using FeedDemon though. But this is a great feature that will spark peoples interest in RSS and how they can utilize it and maybe think about getting a stand alone reader or use the built in features of Firefox and IE7.

    Good job WP guys

    Like

  16. Michael Sync Nov 22nd at 6:19 am

    it’s better… Nice one..

    Like

  17. blayde Nov 22nd at 6:29 am

    More knobs to fidlle with, nice…

    Like

  18. tdinoz Nov 22nd at 11:18 am

    Nifty

    Like

  19. David Raho Nov 22nd at 12:49 pm

    Yep, a lot more user wonderfulistic.

    Like

  20. Phil Nov 22nd at 1:34 pm

    This lets me quickly scroll through my WordPress friends’ most recent posts to see their latest, or it lets me see if anyone’s added anything since I was here last (Day-jobs. Gotta have em I guess) 😉 Plus more I’ll probably use one day. Well-done!

    I’m likin’ this new feature! Thanks!!

    Phil—

    Like

  21. timethief Nov 22nd at 4:12 pm

    @Donncha,
    Please accept my apology for wrongly identifying thebritgirl.com as a wordpress blog when it isn’t. Sorry about that. 😦

    Like

  22. cap Nov 22nd at 5:07 pm

    Thumbs up! 🙂

    Like

  23. Livio Nov 22nd at 5:11 pm

    Very unuseful

    Like

  24. that girl again Nov 22nd at 8:04 pm

    What some of the people in this thread don’t seem to get is that if you’re already using RSS feeds you’re more techy than the target audience for this feature, and in fact the target audience for wordpress.com in general. It’s not aimed at you. Move on.

    Like

  25. misslionheart Nov 22nd at 10:36 pm

    Well done!

    Like

  26. percyball Nov 23rd at 11:04 pm

    I like to surf!

    P-ball

    Like

  27. percyball Nov 23rd at 11:05 pm

    And I am friendly too!

    Like

  28. NW Nov 24th at 4:05 am

    Great work WP! Thank You:)

    Like

  29. بهمن Nov 24th at 8:13 am

    So good 😉

    Like

  30. Nita Nov 24th at 9:27 am

    It’s aimed at me alright! I am non-techy and this is just so easy. I’ve used it. But what I did was to go to a blog I liked and click the subscribe button. Hope that did it. Thanks.

    Like

  31. mosaik Nov 25th at 1:39 am

    Love this. I use RSS feeds for some blogs but this is good for those blogs you occasionally want to look at and which don’t fit a blogroll on a specialised blog.
    Thank you for this!

    Like

  32. Michael Nov 25th at 5:46 pm

    Another winner! You guys are great.

    Like

  33. l1nn Nov 26th at 4:14 pm

    I don’t even get what RSS is, so this friend surfer is good.

    Like

  34. צפריר Nov 26th at 9:05 pm

    Just noticed you guys added a writer field to comments rss – lovely addition!

    Just so you know we also care about the little things that aren’t worth a post of their own 🙂

    Like

  35. LouCypher Nov 27th at 6:24 pm

    sordpress.com

    ?
    Domain to prevent typo-phishing? 😀

    Like

  36. Vedova Donna Nov 28th at 10:38 pm

    I wish we had a directory of WordPress blogs, categorized and all.

    Like

  37. theithatisi Nov 29th at 12:09 am

    Can we have teacups now?

    Like

  38. felixwinter Nov 29th at 8:53 am

    I love the peace world.Let’s sing a song together.

    Like

  39. eas Nov 29th at 8:51 pm

    I think this is a swell feature (in fact I blogged about the lack of just such a feature in wordpress MU a month ago: http://geekfun.com/2006/10/25/wordpressmu-leaves-me-lonely/). Any plans though to make it work with external feeds too?

    Like

  40. bhooi Nov 30th at 9:22 am

    Its great that WP is constantly improving for the benefit of its user, nice work, keep it up.

    Like

  41. Sopheak Dec 1st at 9:49 am

    wicked !!! Awesome!

    Like

  42. martinz Dec 1st at 4:20 pm

    LJ has this for a long time, glad that WP has this feature too 🙂

    Like

  43. Ψηφιακά Οχυρωμένος Dec 2nd at 10:41 pm

    Thanx a lot guys, for you creativity and for the hours you spend making our life easier! 😉

    Like

  44. Rado Dec 3rd at 10:18 pm

    Thanks again!
    This is just awesome 🙂

    Like

  45. diggerjones Dec 4th at 2:08 am

    I use RSS but will also use this because it is easier. I’m okay with it just being for WP blogs for now because I’m subscribed to so many others in RSS! It’s elegant and clean.

    Well done!

    D.

    Like

  46. texasyacht Dec 4th at 9:16 pm

    got the ball rollin,cool

    Like

  47. strategicalliance Dec 4th at 9:41 pm

    Thanks I appreciate it…

    Like

  48. trenavin Dec 6th at 3:25 am

    There should be a way for the owner of a blog to see who has added them to their friends list.

    Like

  49. macdavid Dec 6th at 8:57 pm

    am hooked to google reader… but nice touch guys… would be interesting if podcast functionality could be added.. have you checked out pluggd… where you can search content within a podcast?
    😉

    Like

  50. Felix Winter Dec 19th at 3:57 am

    All of us are busy.However, time is flying smoothly-Xmas and A New Year.
    MERRY CHRISTMAS & HAPPY NEW YEAR

    Like

  51. velvethammer Jan 11th at 4:27 pm

    Just wanted to say how much I love this feature! I do use RSS on my Pageflakes page. But adding a few of my favorite WordPress blogs with Friendsurfer just makes them all the more acessible.

    trenavin
    “There should be a way for the owner of a blog to see who has added them to their friends list.”

    Great idea!

    Like

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