Wow, feedback about the Friend Surfer has been very positive with some great ideas which I’ve been working on today:
- “Subscribe to blog” is in. Just type the url of a WordPress.com blog into the textbox on the left of the page to subscribe to it and track the posts on it.
- If you mark your blog as non-public so it doesn’t show on listings and pages around WordPress.com then it won’t appear when someone adds you as a friend, but someone can still subscribe directly to that blog.
- If you mark your blog as private then anyone who has subscribed to it in the past will be kicked off and lose access. It goes without saying, that private blogs can’t be subscribed to in the first place, but if you’re a member of a private blog, you’ll automatically be subscribed to it.
Thanks for all the great feedback, and I hope you find the new features useful!
Later… after much discussion the Friend Surfer just got another face lift. Instead of adding users, you can only add blogs now. It makes things easier to understand because there are now just “Public Blogs” and “Private Blogs”. With knobs on indeed!
WordPress.com News 
Nice improvements. 🙂
clever solutions, thank you.
Woohoo. Love the new features!
Nifty tool , thanks again
People can already subscribe to blogs, in fact, any rss feed via their browsers.I did not see much use in the friend surfer and I also do not see much use in this.While I appreciate you are working to try improve the user experience here. I have to question what is being done that is useful.
cool, I’m loving the friend surfer.
Thanks for the update. It’s much nicer this way.
@axewielderx: there’s been request for more social/community features, and I’m sure this is one of the results.
I like the improvements.
Thank you!!
axewielderx, even with it right in all the browsers, I think most people still don’t “get” feeds and feed readers. I can see this being useful though it may be too “walled garden” for some of the audience.
WoOOO HooOOO… i like it!!! i like it!!
how is this any different than subscribing to the RSS feeds. I thought the point of the Friend Surfer was so that you could read their comments, too.
very like the improvement…..
thanks a lot
Meow!! I like!!
One downside with FS is that only WP Blogs can be subscribed to whereas RSS readers encompass the whole Gamut of the Blogs out there!
Is there any way to add Blogs which are hosted outside of WP but still run on WP?
yeah I would agree in part with that. But then I am a firm believer in making RSS technology more accessible to users. This feature does that. It is seamless and users are subscribing to feeds and they don’t realise that is what they are doing.
I will stick to using FeedDemon though. But this is a great feature that will spark peoples interest in RSS and how they can utilize it and maybe think about getting a stand alone reader or use the built in features of Firefox and IE7.
Good job WP guys
it’s better… Nice one..
More knobs to fidlle with, nice…
Nifty
Yep, a lot more user wonderfulistic.
This lets me quickly scroll through my WordPress friends’ most recent posts to see their latest, or it lets me see if anyone’s added anything since I was here last (Day-jobs. Gotta have em I guess) 😉 Plus more I’ll probably use one day. Well-done!
I’m likin’ this new feature! Thanks!!
Phil—
@Donncha,
Please accept my apology for wrongly identifying thebritgirl.com as a wordpress blog when it isn’t. Sorry about that. 😦
Thumbs up! 🙂
Very unuseful
What some of the people in this thread don’t seem to get is that if you’re already using RSS feeds you’re more techy than the target audience for this feature, and in fact the target audience for wordpress.com in general. It’s not aimed at you. Move on.
Well done!
I like to surf!
P-ball
And I am friendly too!
Great work WP! Thank You:)
So good 😉
It’s aimed at me alright! I am non-techy and this is just so easy. I’ve used it. But what I did was to go to a blog I liked and click the subscribe button. Hope that did it. Thanks.
Love this. I use RSS feeds for some blogs but this is good for those blogs you occasionally want to look at and which don’t fit a blogroll on a specialised blog.
Thank you for this!
Another winner! You guys are great.
I don’t even get what RSS is, so this friend surfer is good.
Just noticed you guys added a writer field to comments rss – lovely addition!
Just so you know we also care about the little things that aren’t worth a post of their own 🙂
sordpress.com
?
Domain to prevent typo-phishing? 😀
I wish we had a directory of WordPress blogs, categorized and all.
Can we have teacups now?
I love the peace world.Let’s sing a song together.
I think this is a swell feature (in fact I blogged about the lack of just such a feature in wordpress MU a month ago: http://geekfun.com/2006/10/25/wordpressmu-leaves-me-lonely/). Any plans though to make it work with external feeds too?
Its great that WP is constantly improving for the benefit of its user, nice work, keep it up.
wicked !!! Awesome!
LJ has this for a long time, glad that WP has this feature too 🙂
Thanx a lot guys, for you creativity and for the hours you spend making our life easier! 😉
Thanks again!
This is just awesome 🙂
I use RSS but will also use this because it is easier. I’m okay with it just being for WP blogs for now because I’m subscribed to so many others in RSS! It’s elegant and clean.
Well done!
D.
got the ball rollin,cool
Thanks I appreciate it…
There should be a way for the owner of a blog to see who has added them to their friends list.
am hooked to google reader… but nice touch guys… would be interesting if podcast functionality could be added.. have you checked out pluggd… where you can search content within a podcast?
😉
All of us are busy.However, time is flying smoothly-Xmas and A New Year.
MERRY CHRISTMAS & HAPPY NEW YEAR
Just wanted to say how much I love this feature! I do use RSS on my Pageflakes page. But adding a few of my favorite WordPress blogs with Friendsurfer just makes them all the more acessible.
trenavin
“There should be a way for the owner of a blog to see who has added them to their friends list.”
Great idea!