FriendFeed, the highly popular social discussion site used by many (including me!), is previewing a beta version of their new site design over at the FriendFeed blog.

The design will feature several new features, such as Friend Lists:

Friend lists enable you to organize your friends into groups. With friend lists, you can get updates from your family separately from your coworkers, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.

Another new feature is seeing a feed of your friend along with all of their subscriptions:

You can now see a feed of a person and all of their subscriptions. This new feature is a great way to show your uninitiated friends what your FriendFeed experience is like, and it is a great way to find interesting people you haven’t subscribed to yet.

All of the new beta features, layout, and design can be seen at beta.friendfeed.com.

A new version of FriendFeed is in the works, perhaps not so surprisingly in itself, but it might be coming pretty soon. MG Siegler over on VentureBeat got it confirmed, after spotting the domain beta.friendfeed.com in his Flickr traffic logs. It is getting harder and harder to keep web apps secret, I’ve had clients in the past who got unwanted attention to online services in an early stage, for instance.

It could, however, work the other way around. Since a lot of bloggers are watching their statistics closely, this could be a way to leak information of a new service to get some bonus coverage before going out flexing the PR muscles?

Over at ReadWriteWeb, Sarah Perez takes a look at lifestreaming applications for the iPhone:

For iPhone users, one of the major benefits to owning the device is the application platform it provides. With apps, you can begin a “real” lifestream - that is, one that acknowledges that more life is spent away from the computer than at it. You would think that iPhone would be a great platform for lifestreaming apps, but there were surprisingly few to be found (so far). We hope to see this list improved in time, if not with apps, then at least with iPhone-ready mobile web sites.

Sarah’s article goes on to accurately review several lifestreaming applications and accurately bemoans the lack of videostreaming applications (or video applications in general) on the iPhone. And I agree strongly with her view of the current market.

There are several lifestreaming web applications that have been built for the iPhone, such as Friendfeed’s iPhone interface for the web.. but none of them really allow you to broadcast your lifestream from your iPhone.

The iPhone is one of the most integrated handheld devices ever created - it’s the best example of a converged device that I can use to describe such technology approaches to my clients - but it still has a way to go in terms of its ability to meet the needs of those of us that try to lifestream their lives.

Michael Arrington calls for a Fake Follow feature on Twitter, and similar on FriendFeed for that matter, so that he can stroke people’s egos. What? I actually makes sense:

[...] there are a lot of people who for some reason are greatly offended when you don’t reciprocate a follow/subscribe on Twitter or FriendFeed. When this happens (and it happens a lot), you have a choice - deal with the fallout (”that guy is such a jerk”) or just friend the person and avoid the pain.

I’ve had some of those myself, and I think Arrington i pretty spot on with the need for a less friendly follow on Twitter. It just becomes too much to handle, both for yourself and, I suspect, for Twitter when you’ve got 300+ followers. Or wherever, it probably depends on who you follow too. The story notes that Twitter “might” adopt something like this, and FriendFeed’s got features coming out to cope with it.