FriendFeed Hires the Man Who Made Gmail Work So Beautifully
FriendFeed, the social aggregation service made up of a whole slew of ex-Googlers, has just announced they’ve brought another one on board, and it’s a big one: Kevin Fox, the user-experience designer who Paul Buchheit credits with bringing the Gmail we see today together.
They’re clearly very excited about this and we should be too upon hearing that Kevin is also the man behind the workings of Google Calendar and Google Reader’s 2.0 interface – the one that really brought it into the spotlight. These services work in ways so that you really don’t have to think too much about them – things just make sense – which is exactly what a good user-experience designer can do.
While I’m a big fan of FriendFeed’s current simplistic look, it certainly could use some UI touch-ups and functionality adjustments to bring it up to full speed. Kevin Fox very much appears to be just the person to do that.
Louis Gray has more on this. You can find me on FriendFeed here.
[UPDATE]: FriendFeed doesn’t stop at mere personnel updates, they have site updates too! You’ll now you’re able to see your friends activity on feeds you don’t even subscribe to. So for instance if they ‘like’ or comment on an item on someone’s feed that you don’t follow, you’ll now see that. This is a nice update that should lend to discovering more diverse content (something which FriendFeed is already very good at).
More thoughts:
