Back to Tech Blog homepage
Facebook talks about it, Twitter feels like it, but only FriendFeed has managed to pull it off.
The web is moving to another gear, with the lifestreaming site founded by former Google workers launching the first truly real-time social media service today.
A new interface - offering a constantly scrolling live stream of entries and comments on a web page - has provoked a stream of comments itself from users on the changes , with many alarmed at the speed of web life passing them by.
But the new look is a true reflection of how the web has been changing. The real-time web has become a reality as users constantly update their lives on internet-enabled devices and turn to the tweets of others for breaking news.
Rather than staying on and constantly reloading Twitter’s web page, followers have adopted desktop software such as Tweetdeck and Twhirl that offer streams of continuous updates of the latest tweets.
They are in fact delayed by perhaps a minute or two, whereas FriendFeed’s technology has now made friends’ updates and comments instant and available within a web page.
The service amalgamates different social media feeds into a “lifestream” that can show a user’s latest tweets, blog posts, photos shared, stories bookmarked, music played, books read, movies watched, events attended etc. Friends can give a “like” approval to a posting and comment, with much of the value of the service being in the conversations that are created around entries posted.
The new interface, which had previously been offered in a different form as an alternative to users, creates instant-messaging style conversations around each post. The experience is dynamic and startling at first view.
“It really is a bit of a magic moment when you post something , it shows up on your feed, and all of a sudden a “like” appears next to it and a comment pops up,” says Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed, who, with his co-founders also came up with Google’s Gmail and Maps.
“I think this is something we are going to see showing up on a lot of websites. When we introduced Gmail and Maps, it felt a little big magical and people thought then: ‘I need to get this on my website’ and I think we are going to see more of that.”
Social media services do tend to “borrow” from one another. Facebook talked about a real-time feed for its new interface, but has yet to implement one. It also lifted FriendFeed’s idea of comments and “likes” for friend’s entries.
The new FriendFeed interface borrows from Twitter. It is designed to allow “skins”, where users can add an image to their background, it introduces and vastly improves upon Twitter’s Direct Message feature, brief biographies are now allowed and the icons of users against their entries is similar to Tweetdeck and other Twitter clients. FriendFeed’s own powerful search feature has received a turbo boost with an auto suggestion feature.
“They are going in a great direction, but what this points out is a need for even more powerful filtering than we have today,” Robert Scoble, the well known blogger and FriendFeed fan told me in a Direct Message, referring to the overwhelming flow of information now being presented.
“The new version takes us toward a new real-time world that is very compelling,” he said.
Tags: Facebook, FriendFeed, twitter
David Gelles, Joseph Menn, Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters in the FT's San Francisco bureau upload their views - plus tech insights from writers in New York, London and Tokyo
Richard Waters
Chris Nuttall
David Gelles
Maija Palmer
Joseph Menn
Robin Kwong
Tim Bradshaw
The latest gadgets and gizmos, reviewed by Jonathan Margolis in How To Spend It.
Paul Taylor, the FT’s personal technology expert, answers your gadgetry questions