A brand new dedicated (non-official) Friendfeed podcast has begun, hosted by Friendfeed users John Worthington, Mark Wilson and Josh Haley.

FFundercats promises to bring the best of the madcap chaos that is the Mona-era Friendfeed, and they’ve just completed their first ‘cast. Check it out over at FFundercats: A FriendFeedic Convergence Of FFunderous Proportions

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.

And I just couldn’t help myself:

Go on, conform. You know you want to. Faceyourmanga.com

The number of Twitter services and applications continues to increase as more individual developers, software houses and businesses come online. Here’s a few interesting ones:

Services

1. Twitterfeed - Twitterfeed brings RSS to Twitter. Used to notify twitter of updates to your sites feed.
2. Summize - Search twitter conversations of points of interest
3. Twittergram - Twittergram enables sending a small mp3 via twitter. Also includes an API.
4. TwitsLikeMe - TwitsLikeMe claims to be able to find people based on similarities in tweet history
5. TwitterMail - Enables posting to Twitter via a special email address. Has neat functions like scheduling.
6. TwitterStats - Keep an eye on your Twitter use here
7. Twittervision - Connecting tweets to a physical location with Google maps
8. Twist - Examine trends on Twitter
9. TwitterCal - Send events to Google Calendar via twitter.
10. Remember the Milk - A great Twitter enabled reminder service! Build entire to-do lists, update them from Twitter, and recieve them anywhere!

Applications

1. Twhirl - A popular Twitter client for your computer. Uses Adobe Air.
2. Twitterfox - A Firefox addon that notifies of tweets, replies and messages. Formerly TwitterNotifier.
3. Power Twitter - Another addon plugin that enhances Twitter with video, flickr embedding, Tinyurl unwinding and more.
4. Twitterbar - A Firefox addon that enables tweets right from the address bar of Firefox.
5. Twitterlicious - A Windows Twitter client. x86 and x64 versions available.
6. Twadget - A Windows Vista Twitter client that enables posting from the Vista Sidebar
7. Twitterific - A Mac OSX Twitter client, also available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
8. TwitterPod - A Mac OSX Twitter client with the ability to store messages.
9. gTwitter - A simple GTK+ based Linux Twitter client
10. Pwytter - A multi-OS Twitter client. Supports Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows with support for 14 languages.

In recent months, Twitter has got something of a beating from bloggers worldwide about frequent downtime, feature reductions and timeouts.

Originally, I was dismayed and somewhat (perhaps irrationally) angry at the ongoing Twitter problems, but strangely, and unlike many bad services in the past, I didn’t drop Twitter. It was only after a long think about why I’m still on Twitter.

Then it hit me. I’m on Twitter still because of it’s ease of use, the 3rd party tools around it, and the people I follow that encapsulate my interest. Identi.ca is conceptually just as good, being an open platform, but there’s something not quite as interesting as Twitter about it, and I guess it boils down to the myriad following Twitter has.

Twitter has gained a massive following, from bread and butter users, to businesses, government, and developers. Followers using the service remain closer to the individuals/activist groups/news outlets/brands/companies/bands or whatever else they enjoy. Useful services have been built on it’s API, which although suffering from Twitter’s problems, is robust enough to accommodate development, giving back far more than Twitter itself and adding value to the community.

Think of all the services that revolve around or add to Twitter. There’s Summize (recently acquired by Twitter), Tweetstats, Twitterfeed, amongst many, many others. Through clever use of these tools, businesses can use Twitter to analyze trends online, position themselves appropriately, and hear what people are saying about them.

These points are why people remain on Twitter, not just for the personal frippery, but for the relationships between individuals and business that can and are built on the system. It’s not perfect, but it works. For now.