FriendFeed launched a beta version of its site yesterday with a redesign that is supposed to make it easier and faster to use.

FriendFeed, originally launched in October 2007, is a social aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media websites, blogs and micro-blog updates, and RSS/Atom feeds.

The new site sports a totally new look: the left sidebar is gone, and key information is located in separate areas on the right, leaving the main part of the page to messages.

The most important new feature is Friendfeed's move into real-time communication. Live streams from friends are constantly updated, and FriendFeed now has chat capabilities - meaning that it can be used as a communications tool, writes TechCrunch.

Having a real-time feed of your friends’ and contacts’ status updates can be fun, but also a little annoying, Friendfeed observes in the demo. But the new site offers a pause button, allowing the user to put incoming posts on hold. When off, an icon tells you how many real-time updates are waiting to be added to your stream.

Some of the other new features include:

• Direct message- and photo-sending, posting messages to Twitter.
• Service icons - the images that appear next to messages and show the source of information (Twitter, RSS, Flickr, etc.) – are replaced with profile pictures of the person who sent the message, making it easier to scan interesting messages and preventing users from getting lost in posts they don’t know.
• More powerful search filters - users can filter searches by keyword or name, or restrict searches to certain groups of friends or all of FriendFeed.
• A search box that gives "friend" suggestions, not unlike that on Facebook

We wanted to make the site look less like a one-bedroom house to which so many wings have been added that it becomes too complicated for users, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said in the demo.

The new design, with its chat capabilities, is also more like Twitter. Considering the fact that the other founder, Paul Bucheit, is the R&D developer for Facebook, it may not be long before all will provide identical services.