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.

Sweetcron, an open source lifestreaming blog software package developed by Yong Fook, has been released.

Sweetcron is a simple package you can use to aggregate your socical networking and blog services together, such as Twitter and Plurk. Prominent features include a neat default theme, a basic blog function, easily customized php/css themes, tagging, and a simple to use administration interface.

Sweetcron is simple enough to leave alone. It will happily aggregate your feeds together in a neat visual fashion and is tidy enough to be used as a simple blog.

View my 30 minutes of Sweetcron customization here at RD
Download Sweetcron (Currently version 1.02 beta)
Installation instructions
Further Support

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.