Search

Awesomeness tracker

View blog authority

NoiseRiver: the Friendfeed App That’s Your New Bicycle.

June 28th, 2008 by possible248

I’m a fan of FriendFeed. FriendFeed, to me, is total awesomeness. At the time of this writing, I’ve written fifteen posts on FriendFeed (including this one). Robert Scoble loves FriendFeed too. But now, I love FriendFeed even more. Why? Because it’s possible to create truly excellent applications with the FriendFeed API.

The FriendFeed API is far from perfect, but what’s making me love it is NoiseRiver. So, who is behind this masterpiece of an API application? directeur on FriendFeed is responsible for this masterpiece of an API application.

So, what do I like about it? First off, the user interface is excellent. It takes the simplicity of FriendFeed’s user interface and entwines it with an elegance that is so hard to achieve when building a good user interface. Click on the below thumbnail to see the screenshot full-size.

Now, it does more than serve up a pretty user interface. It actually solves some of FriendFeed’s most basic problems. What does it solve?

Well, several people have talked how noisy FriendFeed users can drown out the posts of less-frequent FriendFeed users. Now, if you like the posts of the noisy and quiet FriendFeed users, you’re at a bit of a disadvantage. It’s more difficult to hear the quiet FriendFeed users, and there may be some cases when you’re more interested in what the quiet users have to say.

NoiseRiver to the rescue! It allows you to select which users you like more than others.

Okay, but the noisy FriendFeed users might also talk about topics that you aren’t interested in or don’t like at all. What do you do about that?

No problem. NoiseRiver solves this problem by allowing you to insert keywords and rate those too.

Now, I might really like NoiseRiver, but you are annoyed with something in NoiseRiver’s user interface. What do you do?

Wel, there’s the NoiseRiver FriendFeed room where you can post suggestions, and a lot of the suggestions are acted upon immediately.

In conclusion, NoiseRiver is a top-notch web application that has a great user interface and solves some of FriendFeed’s problems.

For some additional reading, you can check out Louis Gray’s coverage of NoiseRiver.

UPDATE: Apparently some people think that NoiseRiver actually has a chance of being acquired.

Share and Enjoy:

No related posts, but you might find these interesting

May 23, 2008 -- Five Ways to Implement an Application Feature
June 6, 2008 -- The Internet and Advertising
April 1, 2008 -- Happy April Fools Day!

Posted in FriendFeed |

Viewing 3 Comments

directeur 06/28/2008 11:49 PM 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Hum... this is a little bit unfair. Everyone seems to be able to write *better* blog posts than me :)

Seriously, thank you so much for the review of NoiseRiver, I really appreciate all your nice words about it. Actually like said in the home page, this app is still alpha an to be franc, I made it in about a week. Lots of things are to add/fix/invent... It was a real joy for me to develop it, and as you said, I wish the API was "larger"... but, heh, like french people say: "On fait ce qu'on peut avec ce qu'on a " (we do what we can with what he have" :)

Again thanks for the review and the link to the room on FriendFeed. Any suggestion, critic, error reporting or rant is really welcome :)

P.S. I'm one of your reader, btw, so keep up the good work! I enjoy it :)

reply edit reblog flag

5 /people/xhtmlcss/ /people/xhtmlcss/following/ http://feedego.com directeur cafefort

plightbo 06/30/2008 08:49 PM 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

NoiseRiver is definitely on the right track. I just left a comment at Karim's blog, but I wanted to also share my take on how to cut through the noise: http://mionews.com. It's also based on FriendFeed, but the UI is very different. It takes a reader-style UI approach and introduces a couple of additional concepts:

* You can "hate" articles. This is instead of "hating" topics. In the background, we auto-tag articles and therefore automatically adjust the scores for various topics for you.
* You can't adjust the like/hate score for individual topics, but you can track topics and see which stories match those topics.
* Unrelated to the relevance ranking, there are some different UI things going on compared to FF and NR. Grouping friends in to folders may turn out to be a good way to keep track of close friends despite other noise-makers (ie: Scoble).

It'll be interesting to compare the output of the two different relevance techniques as time goes on.

reply edit reblog flag

1 /people/plightbo/ /people/plightbo/following/ http://lightbody.net 500067426 in/lightbody plightbo

possible248 06/30/2008 10:28 PM 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

mionews.com actually looks pretty interesting. I'll put it on my list of posts that I may get to in the future.

reply edit reblog flag

3 /people/possible248/ /people/possible248/following/ http://codingexperiments.com possible248

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

blog comments powered by Disqus

On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 12 people and commented on 1 time hide

View this post on FriendFeed

Liked by

June 28, 2008 at 11:59 pm Chacha

The problem is for me atleast, is that I'd rather have it intergrated into Twhirl or another app, than have to go to ANOTHER website. I don't know why, but I don't like the browser always being open

CodingExperiments.com

CodingExperiments.com is a site where I can (obviously) experiment with various demonstrations of code.

Search

Category:

Archives:

Pages

Meta: