We’ve received enough email, comments, and tweets to know there is a significant demand for Friendfeed backup. But it wasn’t quite enough to jump to the top of the development list, and as Bill pointed out in the comments, we have to cater to our paying users first. The Gmail rewrite is nearly complete, and it turns out the Basecamp workarounds for data not supported by the API are done in parallel either way. So we will start on FriendFeed Friday or Monday, whenever the Gmail rewrite is done, and we still should have a solution in time to backup and export your FriendFeed data.

My initial guess is that it will launch in beta on August 24th, and then it will take a week or so to make sure all the bugs are out. Once we get into the code I will be able to give you a more accurate estimate of the completion time.