Why You Must Know FriendFeed, Real-Time Search & Its Advantages?

By Raj | Jul 27, 2009

We discussed utilizing RSS to get the updates of our favorite sites, and the power of socializing and networking and finding a job through Twitter. This week let’s see another advanced networking tool, FriendFeed. Though I joined FriendFeed some six months back or so, I really didn’t care about it (and didn’t activate my account) until a month ago. However, the real excitement started after FriendFeed announced the availability of the major feature “real-time search.”

What is FriendFeed?

FriendFeed is a free web service that makes it easy for you to aggregate all your updates from almost any service (58 services currently) on the web into one stream. You could include your StumbleUpon updates, tweets, Digg activity, Facebook status updates, YouTube uploads, Flickr uploads, etc., all at one place where people can go or subscribe to if they want to stay up to date on what you’re bustling with.

Furthermore, with FriendFeed you can also subscribe to the update streams of other people too, may be it’s your mentor, celebrity, colleague, friend, family member or rather anyone whom you’re interested with or whose updates are interesting to you.

58 services that FriendFeed allows you to share your updates from

Real-time search, what is it?

People are using search engines for searching information but if they want to find out what’s happening “right now” they probably go to Twitter because it’s a mass community. However, now I think if you want to find out “what’s happening right now” you should probably go to FriendFeed because it’s an aggregation of communities. So, what is real-time search? In simple words, it’s the search and return of results instantaneously about things happening currently on the world wide web as opposed to the data displayed by the search engines which get delayed by a few minutes to hours to spider, index and display the latest contents of the web. The term “real-time search” is still in its infancy and Google has thoughts already about improving its functionality in this area; however, realizing the potential, Microsoft Bing has already forayed into the segment to have the early bird advantage with Bing Tweets, fusing Twitter trends with Bing insights. A few other such real-time search engines are getting developed under the hood and a few of them are live already, out of which the most popular one that Google finds out for you is Scoopler if you perform a Google query on real time search. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has tried to get a more detailed definition of real-time search and a few other real-time search engines, if you’re further interested. Given its functionality, I don’t think now I have to further describe you the advantages of real-time search, should I?

What is special with FriendFeed’s real-time search?

FriendFeed didn’t fancy many like Twitter did, including me; one of the reasons being the lack of availability of proper tools and options like Tweet Deck and autofollow. However, the buzz started, especially in the search industry, when FriendFeed announced real-time search availability at the turn of this month. As opposed to Twitter search, the results update automatically and scroll down without the need to refresh. Twitter has inputs from only one stream, the tweets of its users, where as FriendFeed has inputs from multiple streams of its users, that’s FriendFeed’s another major competitive advantage over Twitter.

When I joined Twitter, I was able to find only a minimal amount of medical transcriptionists on Twitter, but that has improved a lot now with associations like AHDI, CDIA, AHIMA, HIMSS etc., joining Twitter realizing the potential of microblogging, and the fever is catching up, and now, the presence of medical transcriptionists on FriendFeed too is scanty though FriendFeed reported the visitor count past 1 million a month in January 2009 itself since the official launch in February 2008. So if you have that unquenched thirst for information and want to remain competitively ahead of others in your circle, FriendFeed can help you quench the thirst by helping you to find new sources of information.

Okay, now I got it. Where do I start?

Go to FriendFeed. If you have already accounts in Facebook, Google or Twitter, sign in to FriendFeed through the respective account. Else join FriendFeed.
FriendFeed will automatically fetch your friends who are in your address book and who are already on FriendFeed or the services chosen by you. Ensure subscribing to them if you want to stay connected with them and watch their activities on the web.
Perform a FriendFeed search for medical transcription or a search for medical transcriptionist to find birds of the same feather and subscribe to the interesting ones.
Install FriendFeed bookmarklet on your browser. Just share any web page to your FriendFeed that you find interesting by using the bookmarklet, that’s it.

We, medical transcriptionists, always sieve the net for latest information, and being informed about realtime search would be definitely advantageous if not at one instance but may be at other. With FriendFeed having data from multiple resources, I think it has a great advantage over other realtime search engines as almost all of them depend on Twitter for information.

With that we conclude for this week, and don’t forget to follow me on FriendFeed to receive interesting updates about medical transcription or rather anything I find interesting on the internet.

Further Suggested Reading:

Tags: FriendFeed, medical transcriptionist, Twitter

7 Responses to “Why You Must Know FriendFeed, Real-Time Search & Its Advantages?”

Courtney Walsh on July 27th, 2009, at 8:30 pm said:

Hi Raj- Thanks for your piece on FriendFeed adding realtime search! Realtime search is definitely heating up as more and more people are searching the web for “whats going on right now.” I work at OneRiot, a realtime search engine, and we have a different approach to realtime search that includes scanning, indexing and ranking the news, videos and blogs that folks are sharing online, right now (it’s not just a keyword filter like FriendFeed and Twitter). Our PulseRank algorithm is outlined in this whitepaper if you’re interested! http://bit.ly/WhitePaper Thanks, Raj! @CourtneyWalsh

Raj on July 28th, 2009, at 4:28 am said:

The underlying innovative concept of OneRiot and PulseRank is impressive. Thanks Courtney for sharing the white paper “The Inner Workings of a Realtime Search Engine.”

Wish you Good Luck in bringing OneRiot out of the beta version soon and steering ahead of other realtime search engines.

Elaine on July 29th, 2009, at 5:08 am said:

You just said the importance of realtime search and Twitter changed its home page with a huge search box and links to the latest popular topics by minute, day and weekwise below that! Great foresight!

victor on July 31st, 2009, at 1:45 am said:

You’re very much right Raj! Realizing the potential of realtime search and to bank on the advantage of having established already with a strong brand name, Twitter is now all set to project realtime search as its core competitive advantage. With its new home page, Twitter now gives huge emphasis on search and trend analysis.

Raj on July 31st, 2009, at 3:06 am said:

@Elaine
@Victor

Thank you.

Though Twitter has started focusing on real-time search, still I feel FriendFeed has the major advantage over Twitter with multiple streams of data input.

J Smith on August 6th, 2009, at 11:26 am said:

AOL too has followed suit since yesterday, August 5, 2009, by adding “Real-Time Topics” to news headline sections like Top News, Entertainment News, Sports News and Finance News to know “What Everyone Is Talking About?!”

As you say, a real search engine war is going on with real-time search!!!!

Raj on August 12th, 2009, at 1:36 am said:

Yep, a lot of things are happening around the Internet this week. Realizing the realtime search potential, Facebook acquired FriendFeed, Google announced Caffeine, Facebook improves its search feature, and the list goes on, it’s a festive season for those on the Internet.