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.
I think we all saw this one coming. The hottest social aggregator out there today, FriendFeed, has launched an application programming interface, paving the way for third-party applications using its service. Full documentation for the API is available on Google Code.
This is certainly an important step for FriendFeed. The closely related service, Twitter, has benefited greatly from providing support for third-party developers, so FriendFeed should see a similar bump from the introduction of its API.
FriendFeed's API currently offers PHP and Python libraries, with support for OAuth apparently on the way. In making the API, FriendFeed also took feedback from some developer influentials, such as Dave Winer.
To give some examples of what its API can do, the FriendFeeders told us, "You can develop a FriendFeed interface for a mobile phone, build a FriendFeed widget for your blog, or develop an application that makes it easy to post photos to your feed from your iPhone."
It's going to be very interesting to see what developers can do with this API, given the wealth of quality data that FriendFeed brings together.
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