Ever since its redesign a few months ago, FriendFeed has been one of the standard-bearers of the real-time web. That’s because while a lot of sites claim to be real-time, FriendFeed is one of the few that actually updates continuously as data comes in. Starting today, any search you do will also get that same real-time treatment.
Enter any query into FriendFeed’s search box and you’ll see a constantly updating stream of items related to it. It works for advanced searches too. Best of all, it also searches through comments left below items. And these results can even be embedded in other blogs, as you can see right now on the FriendFeed blog (or below in this post).
It will be interesting to see if FriendFeed uses this functionality in a business sense. Given that it is now possibly the most compelling way to in real-time search streams of hugely popular services like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, various blogs — and all the comments related to those — a paid search model would seem to be an obvious choice. So far, FriendFeed has shied away from any business model, but has shown possible hints of what’s to come with its “Shameless Self-Promotion” banners.
And FriendFeed still has a few more things in store, including, yes, track for topics (it already has it for people and groups). “We’re also working on allowing you to subscribe to saved searches, add them to your friend lists, and even get notifications based on search keywords. So stay tuned,” writes Jim Norris today.
The timing of this announcement is also perfect considering our own real-time event is coming up a week from tomorrow. And yes, FriendFeed will be a part of it, along with the other major players in the field.
Below is an example real-time search embed to see what people are saying about TechCrunch in real-time.
So need to vent before I go postal on my boss, seriously who would think using jingproject to do simple screencast videos for clients is a bad thing? Who would think using a blog to show the contextual aspect of software is a bad thing? Who would think a website is not useful? Arggg… It is like god created the universe, engineers create computers and thus engineers are one step below god even though when it comes to understanding people some have no idea.. like my boss.. “I don’t like sound on videos so nobody likes sound because everyone is anally obtuse like me”
Ahhh.. needed that… now my question in terms of realtime is what stops it from being too much. I find twitter overwhelming sometimes.. too many updates…
This is major
Yes it is, especially in the world of news and information. I’m looking forward to whatever comes out of your event next week.
Based on comments below, from Josie and Gebadia Smith, the stream is valuable, but can quickly become overwhelming. Michelle Mccormack mentions the importance of filtering.
If some of TechCrunch’s tech-savvy audience feels overwhelmed, the general public might find raw real-time search results utterly useless.
Could news providers filter the results to create consumable stories? I think it’s time for a new platform. One that makes it possible to create and manage curated storystreams. The streams are already there, and many good stories are buried within those streams’ white noise. We need a tool to extract them.
I wish I had a use for FriendFeed, but I don’t. Great technology, but nobody I know is on it.
Seems kind of worthless to me, considering how many comments there are out there.
@Eric – It would be a lot more useful to you if the search had been
techcrunch likes:1 comments:1
that would’ve tossed out 90% of the chaff.
That said, I understand why MG didn’t do that – it wouldn’t look nearly as fast with 10% of the flow.
Nice… looks like Twitter has some competition…
Raza
lame
noone goes on friendfeed, why even mention it? oh right mike arrington does.
I am doing some searches right now on Friendfeed currently on the trending topic #moonfruit and I am barely seeing anything. I am not quite understanding how this will make me use FriendFeed search over Twitter search.
Twitter search is instantaneous graticification and if you think about it Friendfeed isn’t truly real-time. Porting updates from Twitter has a certain amount of lag time, sometimes it is only a few seconds or a few minutes. I want instantaneous and Twitter gives that to me.
I’m sorry, last time I checked, real-time meant that it was REAL TIME. Real-time doesn’t count if you have a persistent connection up searching millions of times and just pull data as it comes to you, that isn’t real-time to the user, it’s only real-time to the server.
How is FriendFeed differentiate its service from Facebook or Twitter?
By being superior in every aspect with exception to spam throughput.
The link on the first sentence (for the word Friendfeed – http://www.tech.../friendfeed.com) seems to be broken.
Kinda of addicting, eh?
New Rule: Let’s not all act shocked that the new Miss California is also against gay marriage. Of course they’re conservative. They’re beauty pageant contestants. If they were liberals, they’d be in college.
http://twitpic.com/92sva
Most (probably all) real time search engines are not real time. Anything that uses Twitter’s api to get their data (much less do transactional data) is at their mercy for how things are cached.
Does Friendfeed use their api, or do they have access to the legendary “fire hose”? Anyone know?
Been waiting for a particular tweet to show on FF’s real time search for 8 minutes now. No sign of it. Even tried refreshing many times. It does show up on Twitter’s search though. It’s all about who has the best access to the data.
In an interview last year, Paul Buchheit said of Friendfeed’s sources: “25% or so are customed XML-based API.” He didn’t mention Twitter specifically.
Great to hear that FriendFeed is being part of TechCrunch’s show
I’ve tried FriendFeed though and to me it really has no appeal at all
I agree with Gebadia it would probably be a bit overwhelming with so many comments and updates.
Suppose I should try it before I knock it.
Josie
@platform45
One of the dumbest days ever to launch a new real-time search services, except for maybe tomorrow or Saturday…
Way to blow a PR event FF!!!!
I know Friendfeed is incredible, I just haven’t figured out how to filter the noise enough to make it useful and enjoyable.
Friend feed is so good he is the only that updates continuously. good job Friend feed ,i am waiting for real time event.
Friendfeed is truly great stuff…
I would like to display the search results without displaying the search box or the search terms in the header, but so far haven’t found an easy way to do that. Anyone?