ReactionDynamics

Friendfeed has just released a new feature called “Real-Time“, a feature that enables you to browse your subscriptions posts live as they happen. This can be done either in the main window as standard, or by popping up a second ‘mini-window’, leaving you free to browse Friendfeed as you would normally.

The benefits of the new feature are exciting. If so inclined, you can “real-time” any list or room you’re in, instantly giving it a kind of chat functionality within that container (though replies to comments are not yet threaded in real-time mode), so rooms are now multimedia chat rooms. Unlike a chat room however, each item doesn’t just consist of text, but items such as video, pictures, links and feeds. Additionally, communication happens instantly, but is also pushed to the top of the regular FriendFeed page making updates accessible to all “static” users, not just the “Real-Time” users. It’s even possible to see the real time updates of a particular user and their friends!

There are a few problems with this basic version of the new feature. Firstly is the classic problem of networks like Friendfeed, which is having many subscriptions. Although this can be managed in many ways on Friendfeed, with “Real-Time” it becomes worse if you’ve neglected lists and leave all your subscribers inside the “home feed”, you will get rapidly flooded with updates.

I wasn’t actually able to like or comment on many updates because they scrolled by too fast, pushed ever downward by the flood. Lists do help with this problem, but also are a detriment if you don’t want to isolate subscribers into secondary or tertiary lists.

Secondly, there’s no way to drill down or filter comments from standard posts, so updates are just a deluge of mixed content. This makes it difficult to follow the thread of conversation and comment on comments themselves, leading to confusion.

Several features I’d like to see added to the Real-Time standard/mini-window:

• Keyword filtering, e.g show only updates containing the word ‘lego’ and so on
• Service filtering, eg. show me only Twitter updates, Last.fm updates
• Stickies, eg. dock a thread of interest to the top of the window, so it’s not just pushed down as new updates occur, and also show a count of comments/likes as they occur on that stickied thread
• Threaded comments, allowing me to reply to a commenter directly.
• Noise control, say, show me only a certain amount of live updates per given time. Let me control this with a slider, AKA Socialmedian style.

All in all, it’s a great new feature. I can forsee Friendfeed rooms for TV shows, debates, and events finding this feature particularly useful. Give it a whirl over here.