FriendFeed Live Updates Turn the Web Into a Giant Chat Room
FriendFeed wants to turn the web into a giant chat room with real-time updates from all kinds of different sources ��� blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Digg and all the other sites FriendFeed supports.
FriendFeed recently launched an experimental new feature ��� real-time updating ��� which allows you to see all the latest FriendFeed posts without refreshing the page. The minute one of your friends add something new, a clever bit of Ajax automatically drops the post into your page.
As Robert Scoble points out, what FriendFeed has done is essentially turn the web into a giant chat room. There’s no need to refresh the page or do anything else, you can just sit back and watch the updates pour in, adding your voice when something piques your interest.
The new live feature is listed as a beta, but it’s available for all your FriendFeed pages ��� just click the “Real Time” link. Even better, there’s embeddable code, which means you can drop a live updating widget into just about any site. For example, here’s the Webmonkey room:
For FriendFeed junkies who always have the site running in the background, there’s also the option to pop-out the real-time view to a mini window.
Keep in mind that the feature is technically a beta and there are a few issues. For example, Flickr photos had some date/time issues (a bug that’s since been fixed), and sometimes, if too many updates come in at once, the posts fly by before you can really see them.
If you’re a casual FriendFeed user getting your updates through RSS or a similar feed, the real-time update feature may not mean much to you, but FriendFeed addicts should be happy to know that getting all the latest news just got a little bit easier.
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