Take your friending topics with you

You can now take your friending topics with you anywhere.

Well, anywhere that lets you consume an RSS feed – like the sidebar of your blog or your feed reader. Topics and #tags are now available in handy RSS format for when you don’t have friendingtopics.com open.

Just click the appropriate orange rss icon to grab your feed. The content of these feeds is experimental so let us now what you want from them. Do you want to be a single click to take you to your friendingtopics dashboard, to a twitter search, to a custom location? Do you want an hourly update rather than a daily? Do you only want to see an update when something changes in the top 10?

Let me know @friendingtopics.

This is just the first of our services to let you take your topics lists with you – if you’d love a specific solution let us know, it might even bump it up our roadmap.

If you’re puzzled by what an RSS feed is then just ignore this post – we’ll be back with more ‘click and go’ ways to move your friending topics around soon.

New look

Our new look went live today – featuring the new logo, and a new lighter layout on the dashboard.

I’ve put more details about how the logo came about through 99designs in a new post over on my blog.

The new layout shown below gives a much clearer space for your tweets, and more flexibility for some of the new features to be added over the coming weeks. These updates will center on allowing you to extract your friending topics and use them elsewhere – like in your blog sidebar. If you have a space you’d love to fill with your friending topics let us know about it.

Some new features

Over the past few days we’ve had some really useful feedback and requests from users of friendingtopics – a big thankyou to everyone who’s taken the time to say hello.

I wanted to take a moment to highlight a few changes to the site that went live today.

• Avatars replace the username lists for active members of your network making the page more concise and a sight prettier too.
• Some additional checks are being made to minimise cross over of hashtags into the Topics list.
• It’s also now a lot easier to see those tweeps that your network are talking about / RTing and hop over to twitter to check their full profile.

First screenshot

Pre-pre-preview screenshot

Nothing in the screenshot above is guaranteed to appear as-is in the released version of friending topics, but this is a useful hook for any discussion or references I make in discussing the functions as we polish them.

Basically you hover / click on stuff in the blue panels to make the tweets shown in the white panel to the right change. Hover on ‘twitter’ and only tweets mentioning twitter will be displayed. Click the image for a zoomed in view.

Tweet me if you’d like to join the test users in playing with the site.

Good morning

FriendingTopics has a simple objective – to allow you to see an overview of activity on twitter when you don’t have time to read 200 tweets an hour.

Taking the idea behind trending topics and applying it to your network, we produce a new view on recent tweets which highlights active topics, hashtags, and users – all in a sing page load interactive tweetstack.

We’re in private testing right now, but if you’d like to help with testing just tweet @stevenmilne or @friendingtopics and we’ll send you a link. Follow @friendingtopics to find out when we start letting everyone in.