The most boring site on the planet, FriendFeed has a new beta redesign, which is still mighty sucky, but it has added the most important feature in the history of social networks, Fake Following, which TechCrunch describes as a "seemingly unintuitive feature that allows users to look like they're following their friends without actually getting their updates." More like this, please.
Yeah yeah, FF is totally deglamourized, but the idea behind it is exactly right. look at the fimoculous.com home page: here's my twitter over here, my comments over there, yadda yadda. Now compare the "what I'm up to" column on anil's blog. Pretty friggin hot.
I actually installed movable type to get that functionality, only to find that the MT activity stream doesn't play nice with, e.g., tumblr. But so you can strip the chrome off the FF badge, and aside from some clunky wording, it can look decent.
Not to mention it can port to my facebook home page, thus putting it in front of the eyeballs of what few people might actually care about it.
posted by alesh at 10:49 PM on August 25, 2008 
"fake following" : are we really applauding a fresh new way to use the internet to be a little more weaselly? Isn't this just postponing the in-person awkward?
posted by josh at 12:20 AM on August 26, 2008
are we really applauding a fresh new way to use the internet to be a little more weaselly?
No, we're fighting weaselly with weaselly.
posted by Rex at 12:25 AM on August 26, 2008
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