With some level of hype, FriendFeed unveiled their new design today; you can check it out at http://beta.friendfeed.com. Ugh.

I was already taking a step back from constantly keeping up to date with statuses there; last week, Dave Slusher made a great observation that I wholeheartedly agree with…we all should spend less time adding value to other services (like Twitter, FF, FB, etc.) and more time on our own sites, podcasts, etc. as well as directly at sites that we enjoy. So I’ve spent a happy week catching up on posts at postings at places I really dig (like Dave’s site, Charlie’s Diary, Jon Udell’s blog, etc.) and not worried so much about the meta-meta talk at FriendFeed.

This latest update, assuming it reaches the standard site in anything like it’s present form, would go a long way toward killing the site’s remaining usefulness for me. I’m not there to watch excitedly as twee…er, posts from 1,000 random C-level celebs float by; FF did at least allow me to keep track of relatively complex conversations about a post. Now, the comments on a post increase without even pushing that stream to the top, which basically kills any usefulness to me that the site would have.

I’m not planning on removing my account or anything, and I might muck about it enough to at least tell when someone is trying to talk to me. But I’m SERIOUSLY not impressed, and I think that this design is deeply flawed. That being said, it very well might succeed, as it’s enough like twitter that they may catch some of the twitter hype (which IMO is pretty obviously what this is intended to do), but it’s 100% FAIL from my standpoint.