DISQUS

Dobromir Hadzhiev · 5 months ago

ego search is fun again

Jeroen de Miranda · 5 months ago

this is another major step forward for FriendFeed; now FriendFeed can e.g. be used during conferences to track #hashtags on a realtime basis.

justinlevy · 5 months ago

As someone that runs multiple conference series, that's a really interesting concept. We had a dashboard created that pulls in blog posts, Twitter Search and Flickr. But, with this addition you could pull in everything, you''d just need to find a way to display it nicely.

iMJR · 5 months ago

Nice blog post, Louis! I see you've done your research, could this be the beginning of new updates? I mean just yesterday they added the themes. What are they going to add tomorrow?

Louis Gray · 5 months ago

I don't have any more insight than you do, but I bet they take tomorrow off and have a 3-day weekend. That said, this team can code better while sleeping than most companies do while awake. So I never count them out.

Rob Sellen :o) · 5 months ago

you lost your ego? :o/

Shane · 5 months ago

FF FTW!

John Serra · 5 months ago

Real-time search is a great feature.. Yeah!

Sean McBride · 5 months ago

Why I am using Peoplebrowsr for real-time search: I can quickly click through 16 searches with four keystrokes using the right cursor key in just a few seconds. Bam. Zap. Mainlining the net with zero friction. I like it like that.

DGentry · 5 months ago

Its bizarrely recursive to be reading an article about real-time search, whilst in the middle of the article a real-time search box merrily shows people linking to and discussing the very same article on real-time search.

Louis Gray · 5 months ago

Admit it, you just wanted to leave a comment so you could see it pop up in the box. :)

nicefishfilms · 5 months ago

@ sean - using Peoplebrowsr for the same thing. seems a little heavy though.

Sean McBride · 5 months ago

A bit heavy, indeed, but I don't know of any other real-time search service that comes close to providing the ability to navigate so much info so quickly and efficiently. Monitoring dozens of feeds on what is essentially a single screen is a breeze.

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) · 5 months ago

A couple of observations:

(1) The search capabilities are not perfect. I have been unable to determine why this FriendFeed entry never showed up in the window above. But when search works, it truly works in real-time.

(2) This probably goes without saying, but the "Spanning 50+ Social Sites" in the title needs to be clarified. FriendFeed only searches the information that was input into FriendFeed. So if you enter a blog post title, all that FriendFeed knows about is the title. But if you then append portions of the post (or the entire post) as one or more comments, then FriendFeed can search that also (provided you're not using an "intitle" search or something like that). One ramification is that if you really want people to see your blog post content, and it's not critical that they go back to the original source to do so, then you should append your entire blog post as a comment - and coincidentally, FriendFeed recently expanded its commenting capabilities to allow long comments.

Michael Fidler · 5 months ago

When I think about everything friendfeed has done including today; it's clear who the visionaries are of the realtime web. They just get it, and they also have the skills to pull it off. It's very impressive.

Brandon Mendelson · 5 months ago

Nice! I think there are some real interesting implications here, particularly for stories involving breaking news.

Kevin Sablan · 5 months ago

You're absolutely right. This type of search is the base upon which a storystreaming platform can be built. Though the raw feed is useful, it contains many issues that make it difficult for many to follow a story: content repetition, spam-flagging, lack of context around individual posts, etc.

Automated systems could leverage the wisdom of the crowd to try to create "stories" out of real-time search, but even Techmeme added a human editor to their team.

Social media-savvy bloggers and journalists can handle the task and create those stories in new blog posts, but that post would not reflect real-time changes.

With a smart editing and real-time publishing platform, experienced journalists with social media skills, or social media ubergeeks with journalism skills, could address some of the issues I listed above:
- Repeated content could show up as one item, and given proper prominence.
- Spam could be identified and filtered out.
- Individual posts could be visually tied to related content.

Bob · 5 months ago

But if no one uses friendfeed it's all a little irrelevant no?

Ken Stewart | ChangeForge · 5 months ago

So does this replace Google Reader?

Joe Dawson · 5 months ago

Friendfeed continues to add new and exciting features for the userbase, the site offers considerable value and potential with the real-time capabilities. I feel it's only a matter of time before the site experiences a real hockey stick moment in terms of its growth just shooting up!!

justinlevy · 5 months ago

This is a really interesting update from FF. I wonder how long it will now be until Facebook releases FB search and how similar it will be to FF...

Scott Gould · 5 months ago

OK - so that's insane.

FriendFeed is solidfying itself as the centre of our social profiles and even social research. Still the question for me is, what about the mass market? What will be the next social media tool to enter into the mainstream - and how do we facilitate this, as opposed to sharing content between ourselves till the cows come home...

Thoughts?
SG

Sakib · 5 months ago

It's really awesome and thanks for the great review.

SharoHill · 5 months ago

Nowadays, people are getting more and more interested in real-time results instead of traditional search results. FriendFeed will surely succeed for its innovative features that help people getting more precise real-time results. However, there are strong competitors like http://aafter.com/ that also provide real-time searches from Twitter and FriendFeed has to compete with them.

Regards,
SharonHill

Mike Chelen · 5 months ago

Sean: now some of the features that were available only through clients such as peoplebrowser can be had natively, making them more accessible to many users :)

Andy Bakun · 5 months ago

That is really the right headline for this FF feature: the fact that it's real-time for all these different sites. FF continues to be a powerful tool, well defined and eminently useful and usable.