I like what they have done in a very short time indeed. It is also funny to see the look and feel of the site itself. It looks like Google. Minimal. The top right corner bar. I can almost picture Bret going through Marissa’s UI review with this bad boy (which will make it all the more easier to sell back to Google ;).

Obviously this is only step one in their plan. I have already found that I don’t go back to friendfeed.com often. I forget. It doesn’t call out to me, and with the small subset of friends that I have on there, it drowns out pretty quickly as you are now getting every bit of noise from each person. I do sometimes look at the RSS feed output, and the one liners fit into the reader nicely. But I rarely jump through.

I am hoping that this can extend and become something more like The River. There are elements of it already, but I want more. I don’t want yet another site/feed to look at. I want one. I want top notch controls to help me filter out the noise. I need the back-end system to be very smart and to batch together information. If a bunch of my friends have dug something, that means a lot more than if Bob did.

I have a feeling these guys will iterate fast, and we will see more incremental tweaking in the near future.