The talk of the town, at least in the “cool kids crowd” of hip social networks, is the new beta rollout to Friendfeed’s service. There’s a lot that can be said about it (and a lot being said about it by others). The sense of the users, though, could best be described as cautiously optimistic at first.

First, the facts. Here’s what’s new in this release:

* The color scheme: As you can see – grey dominates. As you may know, I’m a fan of the well-used gray theme.

* All entries lack source identifying icons.

* Direct Messages are now allowed within Friendfeed.

* Keyboard commands.

* Oh yeah – and then there’s real time. Remember the real-time feature they debuted last year? It’s that, on crack.

The operations of the new site are definitely impressive.  I, personally, miss a lot of what’s not in this release of Friendfeed.  I’ve been using the service since early October ‘07, so I’ve gotten pretty accustomed to how the old Friendfeed works. Here’s what’s not in the new version:

Re-share.

That friendly icon that says what service the item came from.

That all-white snowfield of a webpage.

The ease of getting to groups. In fact, I miss almost everything that was on that right column.

Just found another MAJOR dis-like – the way to find a permalink for an entry is gone. Why don’t you try to click on "more" for me.

There used to be other stuff that would conditionally show up under that
“more” link, as well, depending on the service it came from.

That the default view is real-time is interesting…
It definitely changes the dynamic of Friendfeed.  New users to the service will likely be able to handle it fairly well, but current users will definitely find the experience overwhelming. 

One of the benefits to Friendfeed, at least for me, was that it was a snapshot of what was going on at the time.  It was easy to jump in on a conversation, leave to come back to it later, and jump back in.

Now, with real-time, Friendfeed takes on aspects of Twitter and Facebook, in that there’s an overwhelming urge built into the service to stay on at all times.  Fans of the new layout have told me that they plan on getting second screens or machines so that they can monitor the service full time.

Most of us, though, simply don’t have that sort of time. We have things to do.  The real-time shift will definitely separate the men from the boys in terms of hardcore users.

What’s more, though, it de-emphasizes the powerful search feature of Friendfeed.

Much hay was made last week about a potential deal between Twitter and Friendfeed over the idea that Google could clean up by incorporating Twitter’s timeline into a real-time search engine, something Google lacks.

Friendfeed’s search is potentially much more powerful than Twitter’s.  Rather than just indexing the random thoughtstream of the Web’s users, it also indexes all the content output by it’s userbase as well, and is very in line with the potential development path of Google Friend Connect.

Every service has to evolve, and it’s cool to see Friendfeed reveal that evolutionary path to us.  I do wonder, though, if this chosen path pigeon-holes them in a way that limits their potential.