You can now share files on FriendFeed
blog.friendfeed.com
blog.friendfeed.com
Not to discredit any hard work but I think FF should consider how this file sharing implementation is any better and/or more efficient than email, and call out those benefits to the end user. I love new technology but this blog post does not get me the least bit excited. What attracts me about FF's offering is the ease of which it is to share files across a (very wide) social graph.
But to the average user, the screenshot they include on their blog looks like your run of the mill email client. And to make matters worse, the two privacy locks by either name suggests anything but social.
http://images.colinanawaty.com/screenshots/a1c3721e8310e9e80...
My 2cents.
As for how this is better/different than email, I don't know any of the email addresses of the people I follow/communicate with on FriendFeed, nor do I want to know. Getting their email addresses is just another hoop to jump through before I can send these kinds of files to them.
I'm sure someone can write a plugin for <insert your favorite email client here> that sends to your whole address book and limits your message to 140 characters. Then we don't need to use twitter either.
It is a cool feature though, and those who can make use of it will, and those who can't won't. Is this going to make anyone switch to using friendfeed? Not necessarily. Will this make using Friendfeed more meaningful for people who are already using Friendfeed for some of their communication? Definitely. Does this distinction matter for every feature deployment? Not really -- at some point in your growth, you can start deploying features that cater to the long tail. Friendfeed's deployment history is to get something out there, see what about it sticks and iterate. Sometimes simple, organic feature announcement, rather than massive fanfares, is a better method (FF has done both). Especially if you're deploying features all the time, not all of them can be epic.
I know why this is a cool feature and I have a FF account. But if your average user looked at the blog post, about 95% of the people that use Facebook/MySpace have no idea how it's vastly different from email. The best editorial that showcases the new feature is on TechCrunch (not their own blog), but again, ~95+% of the people using social apps don't read TC. And per your comment, the screenshot demonstrates using FriendFeed as an internal office communication tool to me — which email / chat both handily dominate.
That's all I was saying really. FriendFeed has a lot of great things going for it, but I fear the general internet population will never hear about them anytime soon. Make no mistake about it, lots of amazing tech has died because it was poorly marketed.
Fact is, FF provides structure to content streams that generic email and chat don't (gmail comes close to providing some structure, but it is still in the email paradigm). It's one-to-many, many-to-many, one-to-one, real-time-based and archived, and encourages succinctness in a way that neither email nor chat can be.
I also agree with you regarding FF providing structure and communication across content streams, but I disagree that's its the best solution. Fact is, Facebook is commoditizing just about every feature of FF, Flickr, Vimeo, Twitter, etc. and generally doing a better job with the user experience and outreach. :(
How is Twitter any different from shouting out a window then? You reach about the same audience, and your average voice is lost within an indistinguishable stream of noise.
Maybe FF's is easier, but Dropbox has made it simple enough that it's not worth it for me to play with other solutions.