20 Comments »Yes, I love calling Facebook the Twitter and FriendFeed killer but I seriously think they may have one-upped the competition on their latest release: the Live Feed. You can sit and watch in real-time what is taking place with your friends across their profiles in an unfiltered manner. This is similar to the functionality the Twitter Search (previously Summize) provided.
Rather than the AP Newswire going across your screen, you now have a live activity feed of all of your friends actions. Soon enough I’d imagine that we will begin to see the activities of friends that are taking place outside of Facebook show up in this feed more frequently, making it much more of a competitor to FriendFeed. Just as with FriendFeed though, the majority of posts remain to be comments.
I’ve included a one-minute screencast below of my live stream newsfeed and I have to say that it is really impressive. Congratulations to the Facebook team on this one. One of the most enjoyable experiences with this new feature was watching the stream of feedback people were providing to the Obama speech last night. It will most definitely be interesting to watch this feed during any significant national event.
Honestly, I have a feeling that the demand for this feature of the news feed is going to grow exponentially as users get used to the new design. The only challenge will be that users that have less friends won’t have as active of a stream. Then again, this same phenomenon takes place on any social media site: the more friends you have, the more content you have to consume. Take a look at the feature in action below.
Someone needs to make an AIR app out of this. Then it would be fairly interesting.
Beside an AIR, perhaps a widget or at the very least make an optimized version that you can have on your FF sidebar.
The functionallity is fine but its no Twitter killer for the simple reason that Twitter is much better than anything else on mobile phones.
Nice - hadn't noticed this. Thanks for sharing Nick.
I must admit I am well impressed with how Facebook merged the Wall and Mini-Feed, they took this a step further with the Homepage and the headed feeds. I agree with khylek I would like to have an Adobe AIR application running with the steady stream of updates but that's unlikely to happen unless Facebook realise the potential and make it possible!
I do like the new feature, but I would love to see a feed of new group posts. I rarely click all my groups to keep up on the new posts.
I guess in a way the video demonstrates why Twitter is still more fun. The update rate is extremely slow and that's not software related; it's simply because people are not as chatty on Facebook as they are on a dedicated service like Twitter.
If an app or API comes out and is regularly used, we might see more use (Adium now supports Facebook chat, for example), but what I get now out of Adium's facebook chat are the same 20-30 status messages over and over again.
Then again, I'm biased. I work there.
It's funny that you say that … a few minutes after this, news feed items were flying by. Can you really pay attention to a million news stories moving by rapid fire? While it looks cool, it doesn't seem very useful. It's the same problem with following thousands of people on Twitter … it just doesn't work
Nick, a few serious questions… and imo, worth legitimate exploration (preferably by you, since you understand both sides of the fence so well)…
How much longer are Fred W. and Paul B. going to play possum while fb slowly but steadily assimilates the very best their respective startups have to offer??
I
hey i can't see the “reply” links on your disqus comments. it's in white font for me. FFox mac. fwiw
this is a very cool feature. agree with commenter below that integrating Group (AND PAGE) activity into the feed is important. in fact it's more important to me that the live option. Items that have no feed presence die. It's that simple. There's no periodic reminder that groups exist, other than getting a mass message from the group owner. Same with Pages. Facebook is leaving a LOT of interaction on the table by failing to integrate these two community assets into the feed structure.
also, they should let me file my email in folders/tags.
You should read this: http://www.neowin.net/news/main/08/08/30/how-fa...
It's not though because of one thing - it's not open. I can't read my feed or comment on my feed outside of Facebook. On Twitter and FriendFeed I can. Provide me RSS and an API to access this feed and you'll compete with Twitter and Friendfeed, and be a pretty good competitor even.
Nick, whether FB Live Feed could potentially be a Twitter killer depends on your definition of the market. If you're talking about the mass-market you might be right, as FB has quite an advantage in regard to the number of users already. However, it's not always about quantity, but also about quality. And that's exactly why I, as long as I can, will only use Twitter, and not FB's Live Feed.
One big challenge human beings will face in the near future is how to deal with huge amounts of information. We'll need to be able to better distinguish between subjectively relevant and irrelevant information in order to deal with the increasing amount of information hitting us everywhere and every time.
Considering this, I actually HOPE that Twitter will not go mainstream anytime soon. Let FB be the community that cares about shoes that peers just bought, about private relationships that seemingly ended 1 minute ago and that will be re-established 2 hrs later again, about embarrassing new photos of the crash at the latest private party, about “drinking coffee now” status updates and hourly news from tons of friends that aren't really that close friends at all.
Currently, I'm simply not interested enough in getting all these little short-lived information bites about mostly PRIVATE stuff, i.e. trivia. And I doubt I will be interested in this anytime soon.
That's where the advantage of Twitter comes into play: So far, it's a one-to-one and one-to-many messaging platform that is particularly popular among IT professionals, new media and marketing people and other early movers. And as such, it's mostly used for exchanging and broadcasting IT related or otherwise “professionally relevant” information with a longer half-life and higher relevance to me as an IT pro myself.
I thus wish FB a lot of success in the mainstream market and hope that Twitter will keep focusing on its niche.
Digg had this quite some time ago.
Barely anyone uses the comments. Maybe for a few comments and that's it. With FriendFeed there are tons and tons of comments posted, it feels like people are actually having a conversation. On Facebook, that only happens with the Wall and that is still a one-to-one convo.
Whatever. Facebook moves me about as much as the Microsoft.com homepage. Facebook *is* the Microsoft of social web - a bloated, domineering, kitchen-sink fail. And FriendFeed is Google - fast, lean, perfect.
Let FB keep assimilating. They can keep doing so until their site runs as well as Vista - it's getting there already.
RIP FriendFeed
Never got to and never will be mainstream.
video no workie
will facebook send this feed as sms to your phone? NO.
the best thing about twitter is that you can get updates throughout the day on your phone via texts. Who wants to sit in front of their facebook page all day? not me