Facebook's Live Feed challenges FriendFeed, Twitter

Facebook has recently launched a new feature that takes aim at life-streaming sites FriendFeed and Twitter. Facebook's Live Feed is an evolved version of its hugely popular News Feed feature.

Facebook's new Live Feed allows you to view all of your friends' updates in real-time.

Found via a tab on the Facebook homepage, Live Feed loads up all of the stories from your friends and updates the list in real-time. The feed is available in Log Mode (seen above) or the more traditional Full Stories. When one of your friends does something, Live Feed slides everything down, making room for the new story, which fades in. The stream is very cool to watch roll down the screen and makes good use of the classic Web 2.0 AJAXy feel.

It's no secret that Facebook has been pushing its microblogging and life-streaming features to the forefront of the site recently. Facebook's "What are you doing right now?" feature is extremely similar to Twitter and its commenting system for news items is very reminiscent of FriendFeed. Facebook's implementation of Live Feed makes it a lot easier to watch what all of your friends are doing.

FriendFeed and Twitter are both very good at what they do, but have yet to gain the mainstream appeal that Facebook enjoys. Facebook is adding another feature that FriendFeed has long had and that has very similar functionality to Summize (now Twitter Search), so maybe it's time for them to start getting worried. By exposing its large user base to these features that FriendFeed and Twitter have perfected, Facebook poses a real threat.

[davideckmier]

um ... you probably should blur out those names... I'm sure your friends would appreciate that.

[Global-Covenant]

I do like the the fact that the feed is in real time but I'm not sure if I like the idea of everyone knowing what I'm doing at all times. Allthough real time is nice I do sense a bit of a privacy issue with some people.

http://www.GlobalCovenant.com

[barefootmeg]

Though the LiveFeed sounds like a good idea, I find it ridiculously painful to use. Perhaps I'm just missing it, but it seems that there's no way to filter out what you don't want to see (Mandy just found an egg on her page!) from what you do want to see (Cindy is moving to Washington! I'll post all the details on my blog tomorrow.)

Multiply.com has a fantastic filter system for their inbox that has certainly spoiled me, but certainly Facebook could do a little better than this.

[tuvinh]

Yes, I think so. Don't talk about their features here. Facebook is #1.

http://www.tuvinh.com

[thegiver61]

at work watching all this go down