The Last Podcast

When I talked to Bret Taylor from FriendFeed today, he mentioned that they were adding about a feature a week. What he didn’t mention was that Friendfeed was going to add a very good search function as soon as today. I guess this doesn’t come as a surprise, given that FriendFeed was founded by ex-Googlers.

Whereas before, you couldn’t search for anything and just had to wade through the back pages to find an item you might vaguely remember, you can now search your little heart out within the content that your friends have shared.

FriendFeed is already a very sticky site and, as TechCrunch points out, this new features now turns FriendFeed into even more of a destination site:

FriendFeed is clearly more than a simple service to aggregate lots of data from other websites and then access it via RSS. Users can comment directly on posted items (and do so frequently). Now they can search, too. More and more FriendFeed is looking like a destination site built on the back of all that third party data.

Also, as MG Siegler points out on VentureBeat, the pressure is now really on Twitter to add search itself.

Some more observations:

When you search, it search in the items and the comments - I don’t think you can stop it from doing that.

When you do an advanced search, it autofills the search box with something like service:twitter <searchterm>, but you can just use the shortcut ‘twitter: <searchterm>’, or ‘blog: <searchterm>’ to make your search more granular (same for all the other services FriendFeed supports) - very much like in GMail.

You can search beyond your own network in the advanced search or by searching from the everyone tab.