In an effort to personalize the site, FriendFeed has added a new feature dubbed "Rooms." Similar to Reddit's personal Reddit feature, or Flickr Groups, Rooms are designed to act as a filter on FriendFeed's noise level by offering topic-based discussions.
The new Rooms feature allows you to carry on conversations without involving the entire FriendFeed community -- think of Rooms as your own private area of FriendFeed.
Depending on the privacy settings you use, FriendFeed rooms can be a place for niche conversations between like-minded users, or as an entirely private conversations limited to family members or co-workers involved in a project.
There are scores of rooms already active on the site -- a quick Google search reveals topical FriendFeed discussions ranging from DSLR cameras and tech blogging to baseball. The Laughing Squid community also has a feed room.
To create your own room just head to the Room tab and then invite other FriendFeed members. That's about all there is to it. You can create multiple rooms and each one will show up as a sub-tab under the main Rooms tab.
There are options to control whether or not posts to your Room show up in your main feed or remain private.
Rooms does slightly complicate the process of posting to FriendFeed since you'll need to select a destination for your posts, but it isn't too difficult to sort out.
The FriendFeed API has also been updated to support the new Rooms feature.
Given the amount of noise sites like FriendFeed generate, the ability to section off a small part of the site and make it your own could go a long way toward making FriendFeed more useable for those who don't want to put up with the boggling amount of simultaneous conversations the site inspires.
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