FriendFeed has released a real-time page that auto-scrolls all updates from your subscriptions.  There’s a mini window option that allows you to see it in a separate window, but I’ve found the best way to view it is as a sidebar in Firefox.

To get this you need to bookmark the mini-window page, so open the mini window, right click on the page and select ‘Bookmark this page’.  Then right-click on the bookmark, select ‘Properties’ and check the ‘Load this bookmark in the sidebar’ check box & click ‘Save Changes’.

Now when you select this bookmark, the real time view will open in your sidebar - awesome!.

Just in case you didn’t know, you can see what the new Facebook profiles are going to look like here http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php

The new layout has a lot more dependence on AJAX/Javascript and they’re clearly focusing on the news feed.  To access the application boxes & info that used to be on the profile page you need to click on one of the tabs under the person’s name.  Also the link to comment on a news item is now the word ‘Comment’ instead  of the rather ambiguous little icon it is currently.

The obvious comparison here is with FriendFeed.  The current version of Facebook doesn’t allow you to comment on items directly from the news feed, you have to go to an individual person’s profile to do that.  We can’t see whether this will be possible in the new version of Facebook because it’s not showing us the news feed yet.  When you click on the home link on the new facebook site it just reloads the profile page.  If they do allow this it will become very much a FriendFeed clone. 

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FaceBook has been slowly updating the Mini-feed displayed on a user’s profile page to look more and more like a FriendFeed-esq lifestreaming application, by allowing you to include actions from other sites, and now allowing comments on the items.

Triston McIntyre has a good post on the details and possible implications of these changes on Profy, especially as to why FriendFeed probably doesn’t have to worry too much about this:

In execution, I seriously doubt Friendfeed has anything to worry about. Though Facebook does have a friends feed on each user’s homepage, and individual mini-feeds on every user’s profile, Facebook’s feeds are structured very differently than FriendFeed. Where on FriendFeed, the feed is pretty much the focus, mini-feeds on Facebook are largely overlooked, except perhaps by those jealous lovers and "interested" others (oh, come on, everyone has them.right?).

Facebook is essentially Social 101 for those looking to get connected to friends. Platforms like FriendFeed and Twitter, at least at this point in time, are just a higher level of social media. Adoption of both platforms is increasing, but I don’t think that FriendFeed needs to worry about losing its user base to Facebook-happy comment heads. Sleep easy, FriendFeed, and enjoy the flattery by imitation.

However, Google Operating System has a post today outlining the features in the new beta of the iGoogle homepage.  The new iGoogle will have a lot more ’social’ features in in, including a gtalk chat & gmail directly on the page, but the thing that I noticed was the ‘Updates’ box on the right.  This seems to be a feed of all the things you’re doing on Google’s products.  The box there has a number of items on it: shared items from Google Reader, photos from Picassa, shared themes for iGoogle, shared gadgets and status from Gtalk.  There’s also the ability to add free text (and presumably links) in a box above the list.  There doesn’t seem to be any non-google content in there, but I can’t believe that it would be possible to do that.  If it’s not a feature now, you know it will be very soon.

So FriendFeed may have some more competition in the not too distant future.

You may think you’re a big user of FriendFeed, you may think you have heaps of followers and everything you submit gets liked & commented on.  Sorry, that’s nothing.  Google has spoken and the most important FriendFeed members are…

Deepak & Kevin, congratulations.  Google says you’re more relevant than the About page, the FAQ or the public feed.  That’s pretty impressive!

Additionally, if you go the ‘More results’ page you’ll note that the order goes like this:

1. Homepage
2. About
3. Public Feed
4. Scoble
5. API
6. Bookmarklet
7. Blog
8. Louis Gray
9. Changelog
10. Steve Rubel

Hands up anyone who’s surprised to see Robert at number 4?  Anyone, anyone?

For anyone who’s game, and especially for anyone who’s been having problems with the FriendFeed Comments plugin, I’ve just checked in a new beta release that you can download.  It’s not available through the WordPress auto-updater yet because it’s not been tested sufficiently.  So if you’d like to help out you can grab it here: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/friendfeed-comments.1.6.0beta.zip

There aren’t any major visible changes.  There’s a couple of tidy up changes eg. I removed some inline styles that I should have moved into the default stylesheet, but the major changes are behind the scenes.  Some people were having issues with the plugin not retrieving the information correctly and it seemed to be an issue for people with a large number of posts & comments.  So this new version now stores the data in a custom table on your WordPress database.  This should make things much more efficient and hopefully less error-prone.

If you do install the new update you must deactivate & re-activate the plugin, then go to the settings page & click ‘Save Changes’ before it will work.  If you don’t the table won’t be created and it won’t work.

If you can help out with the beta testing it would be much appreciated.

One of the main issues that some people have been having with the FriendFeed Comments Plugin is that sometimes, seemingly randomly, it will fail to match up a post with the information from FriendFeed.  There are a couple of reasons why this does happen, but the problems all centre around the fact that I have to use the post title to match up the details because there’s no other uniquely identifiable piece of information available.

This is of course a problem when people edit the title, either due to a typo or a editorial change.  Also there seems to be some string encoding issues, especially around the 32,000 different characters that can render to look like an apostrophe.    I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to strip out the special characters and normalise the titles so I can be sure of getting a match between what’s on the blog & what’s coming back from the FriendFeed API.  I even tried just stripping out non-alphanumeric characters, but then I had a complaint from an amazingly patient person who’s site was using Cyrillic.  So what I’ve got now is a rather hodgepodge solution where it tries to strip out as many characters as possible, then does an md5 hash on that to use as the id, and some people are still having issues where, for no apparent reason, the posts won’t match up.

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