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Friendfeed is a one stop shop for all of your social network and news needs. It exists for about two years now and is steadily growing. When Facebook launched their redesign a couple of weeks ago they had copied a large part of the interface of Friendfeed. Now Friendfeed has got a redesign of its own, which has launched today in beta mode on http://beta.friendfeed.com. After having received feedback from the users they will transfer this design to the main site.

As I said the site is your main hub for all of your online communication needs and this has only improved since today’s redesign. It’s very versatile (it can be used in many ways) and very powerful (you can add an extract a lot of information).

One way of using it is just like twitter, but then with many more possibilities of adding images, videos and links to your messages. So forget about twitpic, mobypicture, powertwitter and other services like URL shorteners and unshorteners, because you can all add it to Friendfeed. Another way of using Friendfeed is by having a great overview of all of your contacts online activity in one place like blogposts, flickr photos, vimeo videos and digg and youtube favorites for example. On the other side it’s a nice way to collect all your own things and display them in a nice centralized way.

But enough introduction. I’m just telling this because I am enthousiastic about it and think Friendfeed could easily replace twitter, facebook, myspace and other social networks. You just have to know how and take some time figuring out the site. To see the new design in action go to http://beta.friendfeed.com. You can find my profile on http://beta.friendfeed.com/tobiasverhoog.

The most interesting changes since today are:

• All the pages are real-time now. (This can look imposing, but there is a pause button and with the right filters and lists this becomes very usable)
• You can send contacts direct messages. These are regular posts, but the receiver gets a flag in their received messages list. This is what I was missing to have it replace twitter. I have to give it some more tryout time and of course my twitter contacts have to make the jump)
• In the design the person from whom something comes is more emphasized than what source it came from.
• There is a (modest) profile page.
• Filtering and searching has changed and improved. This requires some more time to figure out and setup, but after a while you can perfectly tune the site to your needs.

There are all sorts of large and small changes, that above all have to make the communication and sharing with your contacts easier. It’s a bit more like a real-time chatroom. For more elaborate reviews go to Techcrunch, Scobleizer, Thomas Hawk and the Friendfeed blog itself. These blogs have already gotten a preview last friday. They had only forgotten to invite yours truly. It’s a disgrace…