We have only been in private beta for about a month and some of the features you talk of were implement since then – so we are very actively working on site.

In regards to the sign up – we are going to work on that to make it more straight forward and the same for the RSS feeds.

Interest levels were designed on a per-person basis. The idea is that you have people in your life ranging from close friends to casual acquaintances. Close friends/significant others might be a interest level 5 and casual acquaintances might be a 1. By doing this you an ensure that you don’t miss anything that interest level 5 people say in the noise and if you are very busy at the time you can skip reading some of the lower levels, till later (if it all – sometimes there is just too much to read).

We are working on usability, new features and some documentation. We have a blog at http://blog.friendbinder.com where we post updates about the site.

• Initially, seems to have nice 3-step setup wizard; however, for some accounts you need to go back and configure each. I.e. I went through and added my accounts, including twitter, but when I tried to post to Twitter, it popped up a msg saying I needed to configure the account. It would be nice if for each account, as your adding it, it takes you through any needed configuration, authorization, and adding of friends.
• Had a hard time figuring out how to add additional RSS feeds. You can easily add one during the initial setup wizard; however, in order to add another, you have to click the ‘You’ tab >> Your profile settings >> Add Networks to this list. It’d be nice if you could have this functionality from the ‘Networks’ tab as well as the ‘you’ tab.
• Unfortunately, the process of adding additional RSS feeds took me completely out of that initial setup wizard, and I cannot seem to figure out how to get back to it.
• It took me a while to figure out the Interest Level functionality. (However, you probably explain it in the setup wizard, and I just missed it.) You initially set all your friends to 3-stars (for example) out of a 5-star rating, then you can go through and give certain friends higher interest-levels than others. For example, EGJ would of course be a 5-star interest level, and my Jaiku posts would maybe be 4-stars. Well, you can then filter so it shows 4-stars or higher interest level friends only. I’m probably not explaining it well, but it’s a nice feature.
• You can single out specific friends for easy cyber-stalking functionality. (And I mean that in a good way!) I.e. if I want to see what Matt’s been up to today, but I have too many social feeds coming in to glance through, I can click his name in the friends list and it filters to only show his activity.
• I did notice earlier that you can directly reply to tweets, but I’ve somehow managed to make my tweets disappear from my stream. But I did see a ‘Reply’ link earlier — as soon as I get them back, I’ll test replying.
• A little buggy, but hey – it’s beta!

I think Friendbinder’s strong point is the filtering capabilities, while it’s lacking a bit in usability. Some work in that area, and it could be a definite alternative!

Thanks again for the invite, Richard. Feel free to correct, comment, or point out anything I missed. ‘You’re *blind*, woman! Didn’t you see the [ABC] button that does what you needed????’

I keep SocialThing open in a tab in Firefox to keep up with my friends from other services. I love that. And, I like that I can post to those services, even reply to Twitter posts, right from the browser. I hope Jaiku services include that.