What you see above is an embed of a special page on FriendFeed tracking discussion of tonight’s presidential debate. The page updates dynamically, meaning no page refreshes are necessary, using similar “long polling” code that makes instant messaging on web pages (see Meebo, eBuddy) work properly.
Friendfeed implemented the new feature tonight. Users can choose to view most of their FriendFeed pages in real time, including topical based pages.
Combining the long polling, real time view of pages and the embed feature also just happens to be a really excellent live blogging tool. Bloggers can leverage FriendFeed’s infrastructure during high traffic events like Apple product announcement and just embed the stream onto their blogs. Later, if they want, they can copy and past the content directly onto their blog for archiving and SEO. There are lots of other live blogging tools out there that do similar things, but they tend to…fail…badly…during big events. FriendFeed has been stable since launching, and seem to understand how to build a service that doesn’t go down.
Robert Scoble says “This is wild. It’s like the web has been turned into a chat room,” and I agree.
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Correction: FriendFeed implemented this, not Facebook… (see paragraph 2)
Is anyone else getting annoyed at all the bullshit stories coming out of places like Techcrunch. There are great, real companies all over the country that Techcrunch has never heard of and would never cover because they are not WSGR enough. These bloggers from Federated Media are by and large such a phony, self-promoting bunch of batshit I cannot hardly contain my contempt for them anymore. It’s fucking like if Battelle, Arrington or Malik didn’t talk about it, well then is must not exist. In my opinion they are a bunch of clubby fags.
Agreed!
You are a joke. Please name these “great, real companies all over the country”.
Better yet, start writing about all of them and many of us will come to read about them. If there is really compelling content out there that isn’t getting coverage, that seems like an opportunity, not something to bitch about in comments.
Use your RSS reader and just scan the TC feed, if it doesn’t have any new company in the title, don’t read the article.
This “live” feature was copied from facebook “live feed”. Good copycat, friendfeed, still arrington thinks fb copies friendfeed.
http://www.allfacebook.com/200.....riendfeed/ (me not related to allfacebook)
The question is - will it rival Google Friend Connect? Anyway, FF sounds interesting and I might want to try it out
Think you have a typo there, Mike. It says “Facebook implemented the new feature” do you mean Friendfeed?
Definitely looks cool though - I see major potential.
yeah, facebook, friendfeed, whatever. all these startups are going to merge someday anyway.
I can’t wait either…
uh oh. that’s not good:
on the upside, it didn’t take our site down.
Sorry about the error, Michael. We had a couple of misconfigured servers. We are updating the configuration now. We appreciate the review, and we are glad you like the feature.
Bret Taylor
btaylor@friendfeed.com
You know and I had just taken a screen shot of that too! So much for your last sentence.
Oh no! Amateur hour at FriendFeed?
Can you set it for just x people or x topic? Also - should there be an option in the window to show friends only for the topic?
Allen: yes. It works on lists. You can build a new list with just your mom on it, if you want, and you’ll see what she types in real time.
Robert - are you tracking my mom again??
yeah, Robert, leave Allen’s mom out of this.
Kiss my ass Scoble.
Sure, create a list containing just you and then embed the realtime piece
no wonder they are ex googlers lol
ahhaahah good one
My blog featured FriendFeed for debate play-by-play for the entire general election series.
To the person, the new Real Time interface got rave reviews. Real big win for FriendFeed.
How does this differ substantially from the Twitter Election real-time feed? This is a serious question.
Matt, FriendFeed’s real-time interface is not strictly topical. You can get a real-time version of all of the people you are subscribed to, a friend list with just a handful of people you are particularly interested in, or (as in the embed above) a specific topical FriendFeed Room. We tried to make it as general purpose as possible so you can get a real time version of any subset of the people you are interested in.
amazing. I currently use friend feed along with many other sites, but I think this would be an amazing widget to throw on the side of a website… I am excited to implement it!
macrumors.com are presumably the site being hinted at re: Apple product launches etc., they have used a live polling update (repeated XHR requests) approach for the last few years at the site macrumorslive.com, and it seems to have scaled quite well in their case.
When’s twitter gonna get a feature?
After viewing tons of statuses and posted items in Facebook’s Live Feed tab in News Feed and writing about 50 comments during the experience, I definitely think this live blogging functionality is going to be very cool on FriendFeed too. Most of the interesting content is on Facebook for me since that’s where most of my friends are, but this is great for people with lots friends on FriendFeed.
Cool, except the embed isn’t updating in real-time for me. It only works when I go to their website.
Anyone checked out coveritlive.com ?
Anyone checked out coveritlive.com ?
Such a useless tool. Don’t know who on earth has the time to follow other people live. Plus, I’m tired of overzealous self promoters. IMHO, FF will never cross the chasm. Useless piece of s**t.
Stop jiggling the babyholders over there with the “my mom” thing. ….lol
Did someone say FriendFeed’s new implementation can boost SEO for bloggers with their blogging tools? Oh boy ol boyee……:-)
hmmm, nice feature but I don’t think that the idea is pretty new. isn’t it ?