The test began at 8 a.m. PT this morning and will feature live-streaming content from four partners: Howcast, Next New Networks, Rocketboom and Young Hollywood.

Right now, live-streaming is in a testing phase, but we have to wonder where YouTube really wants to take this. Is it going to try to compete with the more niche live-streaming players such as Ustream and media blog Beet.TV that it "continues to grow with an average of 32 hours of live video streamed and ingested into the system every minute"? So far, it doesn't seem likely, as the company's release continually emphasized that it would be working with partners. But what good is live for many shows? We tuned in already for Rocketboom's morning talk-show-esque stream and, while entertaining, we wondered why it couldn't be recorded and then broadcast - it would cut out the miscues and bumbled lines, wouldn't it?

A TV Guide for the Scheduled Web

Earlier this week, Live Matrix's co-founders Sanjay Reddy and Nova Spivack gave us a brief demo of the service and while looking at the product, the comparison to TV Guide came up a number of times. Given that some of the core team members - including Reddy and the company's vice president of engineering Edgar Fereira - have actually worked for TV Guide in the past, this comparison is only natural. The site itself also plays on this connection, with a grid-like layout that is clearly reminiscent of TV Guide and similar online and print products.

When we first looked at the service ahead of its private beta earlier this year, we described it as "the live web's first programming guide" and as far as we can see, it is still the only service of its kind.

For the most part, Live Matrix compiles its schedule with the help of its own web crawler, but a number of services, including ESPN and eBay also provide the company with direct access to their schedules. In one of the next iterations of the tool, users will also be able to submit their own events.

Reminders

Just giving users a schedule is one thing, but without reminders, most people will likely forget about future events. Because of this, Live Matrix made reminders one of the central features of the service. Not only can you create email reminders on the site itself, but Live Matrix also provides publishers and event hosts with a reminder widget for their own sites. Live Matrix plans to add text message alerts in the future and the team is also thinking about adding push alerts to a Live Matrix mobile app in the future. Soon, Reddy and Spivack told us, you will also be able to check in at the time you are attending an event.

Filling a Niche

There can be little doubt that Live Matrix fills a need that, due to the proliferation of live video and other scheduled events on the Web, could turn out to be a very lucrative market for the company. In the long run, the team also hopes to create a kind of Nielsen rating for live events and offer companies predictive analytics for scheduled events so that live video producers, for example, can plan their bandwidth capacity accordingly.

For users, Live Matrix succeeds in making previously hard to find events easily discoverable. For event hosts, this new service offers a new marketing avenue and a chance to drive more traffic to their sites. Thanks to the reminder widget, which will probably become quite popular among news organizations and bloggers, you will surely see a lot more of Live Matrix in the future - even if you don't regularly go to the site itself.

Live Matrix Demo from Doug Freeman on Vimeo.

The event is scheduled to start at 9:30am PT/12:30pm ET. You can find our live blog below.

Live Blog

9:15 AM: The live video stream on YouTube is now available here.

9:21 AM: We are seeing some reports that you can already try Google's instant search by going to this URL: http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy

9:32 AM: Still waiting for the event to start. Until then, you can read the FAQ for Instant Search here. According to Google, Instant search can "save 2-5 seconds per search."

9:35 AM: Here we go. Google PR spokesperson Gabriel Stricker on stage, taking care of housekeeping items (WiFi, etc.).

9:37 AM: Why are we here? "State of the Union." Give everybody a sense of "where we are and where we are going."

9:38 AM: "Today, we are going to talk a lot about speed."

9:38 AM: "What we do is part art and part science."

9:39 AM: Marissa Mayer takes over.

Google now has over 1 billion users on its sites every week. Rolled out hundreds of search enhancements in 2010. "This stands to be the best year ever for Google Search."

9:40 AM: Recap of new search features released so far this year: real-time, Caffeine, timeline views, better spelling correction, integration of Google Squared results.

9:42 AM: Also: stars in search. "Users really want to bookmark results."

9:43 AM: "We also had some fun." Recaps Google TV commercials. Plays video of Super Bowl commercial.

9:45 AM: Yesterday's doodles: "We also had some fun with our logos." "We want search to be fun, fast and interactive."

9:45 AM: Today's announcement: a fundamental shift in search.

"How did we get here?" "Many years ago, if you wanted to get all the trivia about a painting in the MOMA, you would've had to spent a day in the library." By 1950, the telephone allowed you to call the librarian. 1995: CD-ROM-based encyclopedia. "But that was static information."

9:47 AM: Today: real-time information. See if a painting is on tour, for example.

Where is time spent on search today? "We have made our algorithms very efficient." Helping people to understand network time and rendering time in the browser."

A search takes 24 seconds. Entering a query nine seconds. Selecting result 15 second.

9:50 AM: To speed things up, we have to bring the time spent entering a query down.

Google Instant

9:51 AM: Google Instant streams results as you type (pretty much what we expected).

Demo of Google Instant (you can try it here).

9:52 AM: Mayer shows that it only takes her six keystrokes to find information about a specific painting at the MOMA.

Switching between search predictions can be done with up and down arrows.

9:54 AM: "It's not search 'as you type,' but 'search before you type.'" "We can predict what you are likely to type and give you those results in real time."

9:55 AM: Google used this idea of "search before you type" as an April Fool's joke 10 years ago.

Will be available later today. Available on Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE8. Will be part of the core Google search experience on Google.com in the U.S. starting this week. International sites - Germany, Italy, etc. - later this month.

9:57 AM: With this, Google will save its users 11 hours each second.

9:58 AM: Johanna Wright (director of product management on search) and Othar Hansson on stage.

The gears that make Instant Search work: instant results, predictions, scroll to search.

10:00 AM: Very staged, stiff presentation. Team shows how weather for San Francisco comes up in Instant Search with just one keystroke.

Second example: auto-completes "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" - black text in search box shows what the user typed - grey text is the predicted search.

"It's not quite psychic, but it's very clever."

10:03 AM: Third example: "Yosemite" - use arrow keys to switch between predictions ("scroll to search").

10:04 AM: The real power in this is when all of these gears work together ("feedback").

More examples ("Addams family").

10:06 AM: "What the heck is the search button still there for?"

Same results as you are used to. "If you know how to use Google Search today, you know how to use Google Instant."

10:08 AM: Yet another example.

10:10 AM: A sneak peek of what's coming soon: instant search for mobile. Coming later this Fall (we can see how this would be even more useful on mobile.

Video of user testimonials from usability lab. Girl: "It was pretty fabulous." Old guy: "I appreciate that you made it easier for us old guys to use the computer."

The Engineering Behind Instant Search

10:14 AM: How can we make this vision a reality? How can we create a user interface that's easy to use? How can we make it useful on your computer? How can we make it work without melting our data centers?

Google tried this a long time ago. Unless the prediction works well, it's not effective to even try instant search - too costly to implement and not useful for users.

10:16 AM: Now: With predictions, this can be done. Google tested this internally and then did live experiments with millions of users. "People learn how to use this very quickly."

Video of eyetracking study. Shows the power of the predictive text and how fast users learn to use the new system.

10:20 AM: Results pages are now in AJAX. Explain the HTTP flow behind Instant Search. "We had to optimized a lot of JavaScript and work around browser performance issues."

10:22 AM: "How do we do this without melting down our data centers."

If Google Instant did a new search for every letter you typed, this couldn't work. Google can't handle 20 times amount the search traffic.

How does Google scale this? Optimizations: prioritizes searches that are the most likely. Checks if users is doing searches on another server. Results cached.

10:26 AM: "We work on search because we are engineers. The scale of the problem makes it interesting. But most importantly, we work on search because we believe it matters to people. Helps them make better decisions."

Last year alone, Google quietly release over 500 changes to search. "But occasionally, we launch changes that fundamentally change how you use search."

"It doesn't just make search faster, but also more fun, fluid and interactive."

10:28 AM: Google Instant was a massive change that touched almost every part of how Google serves up results.

10:28 AM: Mayer back on stage: Search at the speed of thought.

What makes search better: fun, comprehensiveness and understanding (understanding users' intent and the Web at large).

Mayer: "Google Instant Search is a quantum leap for search."

10:30 AM: Over the year, Google Instant will save 350 million hours of Google's users time.

In closing: a Bob Dylan-inspired ad for Google Instant.

Q&A

10:32 AM: Q: Robert Scoble: When will this be in browsers? A: "This is something we are working on. We expect within the next few months."

10:34 AM: Q: Effect on AdWords. A: No effect on this. Clicks are what matters anyway.

10:35 AM: Q: About 20% of queries are currently unique. How will this affect this metric? A: We don't know yet.

10:36 AM: Q: How will this fit in with user's search history. How will these results be tied in there? A: In Web history, queries where you did a click will show, as well as results where you paused for more than three seconds.

10:36 AM: Q (from Irena Slutsky): There seems to be a block list (including for Irena's last name). A: We filter for violence, hate and pornography. As a result, if you are typing something that's not appropriate, we won't show those results until you hit enter.

10:38 AM: Q: How much personal information is needed to make this work and fast? How much more pressure does this put on Google's data centers? A: Personal information: unchanged. For data centers: cost of search has been growing anyway and this is in line with Google's predictions.

10:40 AM: Q for Sergey Brin: Rate of innovation in user interface. Where will this take us? A: This is a new dawn for computing. Things were rather static on the desktop. Over the past several years on the Web (based on the capabilities of browsers, etc.) there is a lot of exciting work going on. This is just a piece of a really changing landscape of computing. The things that will come out from Google and others over the next 10 years will really change how you interact with computing devices.

10:42 AM: Q (Ben Parr of Mashable): Impact on SEO. A: Ranking stays the same. Behavior and the kind of searches we see may change, however. That's a longer term effect and we will understand it better over time.

10:43 AM: Q: Will this be made available around the world, including China? A: Google plans to roll this out everywhere, including the Hong Kong site.

10:44 AM: Q: Do users want faster search? A: yes.

10:45 AM: Q for Sergey: Are you concerned about the fact that we are giving up some privacy to get these better search results: A: Users place a lot of trust with us. We have to be great stewards of your information. Google Instant isn't any different in that respect.

10:46 AM: Q: How will behavior and search change over time? A: As you use it more, you may do more searches in neighboring topics. Easier to explore a topic.

10:47 AM: Q: How many users didn't want this during testing? How does this relate to Caffeine? A: Some users turned it off (there is a switch that allows you to turn it off). Very small percentage. They mostly turned it off because they were on slow connections. About Caffeine: not directly related, but the faster and real-time index made this a bit harder.

10:49 AM: Q: Is this the death of SEO? A: We're sure the SEOs are smart and can catch up with us.

10:50 AM: Q (for Sergey Brin): Did you ever think this would be possible? A: Yes - but it's really thanks to the advance of computing power that this is now possible.

10:51 AM: Q: Lots of people consume the content that a very small percentage of users create. How can you change that? How can you get more people to contribute? A (Brin): To do a great job at search, we need lots of content. We use AdSense to help people make money from their content. Authoring tools like Blogger, Docs etc. We don't expect people to create all their content on Google.

10:53 AM: Q: Plans to make this even faster or are the technical limits at present? A: "Today we will enjoy the speed of this and tomorrow we will work on making this even faster."

10:54 AM: Q (Irena Slutsky from AdAge): How does this affect smaller brands. Does the lower half of the page and page two still matter? A: The user intent doesn't change. If you use page two less, that means you are getting to what you want faster. This is a user-focused launch. We are focused on our users and believe that this is also good for our advertisers.

10:56 AM: Q: If people conduct more searches now, how will users' interaction with ads change? How often do they stop and click now? A: We focus on the user experience. The other effects will follow.

10:57 AM: Q: What about mobile? When will Google release this in Japan and China? A: For both questions:coming in the next few months.

10:59 AM: Q: Can you change the number of suggestions made in the auto-complete? A: No - but we always test different UIs.

11:00 AM: Q (Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land): Changes seem to put even more focus on the top result. How do you improve those results? A: Ranking is a problem we obviously work on all the time. This stuff is tough and search quality is not always perfect.

And that wraps it up for today. Thanks for reading everybody!

What's the solution? Stay up all night? A new startup launching this week called Live Matrix has a better idea. Live Matrix is your program guide to the real-time Web, allowing you to search, save and create reminders for all the live Web events you want to be a part of.

When people think of the real-time Web, they often think only of the "breaking news" aspect. The blog post that just went live with the details of the next-gen iPhone found in a bar. The tweets from ground zero of some big natural disaster. The new Web service that just opened its doors to the public.

However, a lot of the real-time Web is planned in advance. It's the product launch you've been waiting for, the daily video podcast you like to watch recorded live, the Second Life meetup that you've known about for a week.

Live Matrix wants to help you better manage these types of scheduled events. It's the "TV Guide" for the Web. And unlike a lot of startups launching these days, it doesn't have us saying, "Hmm, that's interesting," - it has us saying, "Wow! I needed that!"

The service was co-founded by Sanjay Reddy, whose experience has spanned across industries from banking to animation - in addition to an SVP position at Gemstar-TV Guide, makers program guide technology and publishers of the well-known printed mag, "TV Guide" - and Nova Spivack, a longtime Web entrepreneur who gave us Dice and the brilliant, but ultimately overly complex Twine.com, a semantic Web application that was eventually acquired by another semantic-focused startup, Evri.

But where Twine was confusing and poorly organized, Live Matrix is simple and straightforward. Perhaps that's due the company's decision to use an outside design firm. Whatever the reason, it works.

Live Matrix Features

In fact, there's isn't even a need to explain how to use it. You've used search engines and program guides before; you'll figure it out.

But we will mention the service's many standout features:

In the works is an alerting feature that would let you track events based on keyword or interest (e.g. "shoes," "Apple," etc.) and more advanced analytics.

Live Matrix is in closed private beta right now, but you can sign up to join via the website.

San Francisco's Justin.tv announced today that almost one and a half million people have downloaded the company's live-video-stream-viewing app to their iPhones in the first month it's been available. From Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech, to the Future of Money conference, to a lot of content I don't care to watch, Justin.tv is definitely getting traction. This isn't the only company fast finding a lot of consumer interest in mobile video streaming, either.

The point is: People love live streaming video to mobile handsets.

Justin.tv said today that it has made major stability updates to its app (sometimes these things still feel like tin cans with string between them), and added push notifications to alert users when their favorite live shows are broadcasting. The iPhone app already contributes about 20% of the company's total new account sign-ups.

We don't know how many downloads the Ustream app has seen since it first entered the iTunes app store and was featured prominently there, but if we assume that the same one half of one percent of users will have rated the Ustream app as have rated the Justin.tv app, then Ustream would have seen well more than 11 million downloads so far. Presumably if the app had in fact passed 10 million by now, we would have heard about it.

The moral of the story, though, is that live streaming video sent to mobile phones is here and people like it. Live video broadcasting from mobile is much, much less popular of course, but content creation is always less popular than consumption.

It's exciting to imagine how a more mature mobile, live-streaming video market will look. I'm ready to watch all kinds of things happen live on my phone.

YouTube streaming live sporting events? That could really shake things up. The UK Guardian said today that the deal is "casting into doubt the value of British TV broadcast rights." Contrast this cricket deal with Major League Baseball's $110 per year online subscription service.

At a time when late night talk show hosts in the US are battling it out for TV time slots, news like this is just one more reason to wonder how long it will be until more big-ticket cultural phenomena move beyond seeing the web as a sideshow for stirring up popular support ("I'm with CoCo" Twitter avatars, etc.). Will there will be a major exodus onto the web as the main stage? TV execs have got to be feeling nervous.

For the rest of us, for media consumers, a post-scarcity media landscape where competition for viewers isn't made easy by captive audiences and advertisers could be a very good future. Of course the future is hard to predict, people thought television was going to be a major force for democracy.

Live sports and other events on the internet could very well prove to be for consumers, as they say in cricket, a batsman's paradise.

Mobile carriers have invested heavily in building out their 3G infrastructures and they now are in need of recouping those costs. By offering compelling applications and services that take advantage of the increased bandwidth, they have the opportunity to generate additional data revenue. A livestreaming application such as Flixwagon certainly fills that need.

The new platform will allow mobile carriers the ability to create a customizable version of the Flixwagon mobile app where additional features unique to the carriers' handsets and mobile software could be added.

The livestreams created by the Flixwagon users can then be streamed to the web, either on the Flixwagon site itself or onto a proprietary web site owned and operated by the mobile carriers themselves. Users can set privacy controls within the app, allowing their streams to either be public or private. They can create groups of friends and family for private streams, which they can configure in the app's settings.

The Platform For Media Organizations

After a Flixwagon livestream ends, the video is made available for later viewing. This makes the offering ideal for news organizations who want to incorporate footage from citizen journalists into their web sites or feature older footage in their broadcasts.

MTV has worked with Flixwagon in the past on a number of endeavors, including three 30-minute livestreams from backstage at a Jonas Brothers concert. Those videos alone hit the Flixwagon site with a total of 6 million streams over the course of one weekend. They also worked with MTV to stream political coverage as a part of the "Choose or Lose" campaign. For this, Flixwagon helped in getting live footage from the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention, as well as exclusive videos filmed back on Super Tuesday, 2008.

VP Candidate Sarah Palin in an MTV interview via Flixwagon, Super Tuesday

Although the company is not announcing partners at this time, VP and co-founder, Sarig Reichert, hinted that there is already interest from a couple of carriers both here in the U.S. and in Latin America.

At the moment, the Flixwagon service supports Nokia devices and the iPhone (via an app for jailbroken phones). However, they will be adding support for additional platforms such as Java-enabled phones in the near future.

Once you have added video to your live blog, users will see it at the top right of the application, but they can also pop it out and resize it. This is quite similar to how CoverItLive already handles YouTube videos, though the option to see videos in their own windows is new. One major advantage for bloggers here is that they can handle text and video all in one application.

CoverItLive provides writers with what they call a 'Writer Console,' which is quite different from what end-users see (see screenshot). The console is the main hub of the application and allows you to add polls, images, audio files, and now, live video. It also displays reader comments on the right side of the application.

One major advantage of CoverItLive is that it allows various writers and editors to work collaboratively, so that one person can handle the writing, another the video, and yet another blogger can focus on interacting with the audience.

Adding live video turns live blogging into a more interesting and immediate experience. Thanks to the proliferation of Qik on mobile phones, we will surely see more events being covered this way. We already liked CoverItLive a lot when we first reviewed it, though it did experience some outages when a lot of people used it during the January Macworld keynote. Since then, though, the platform has become a lot more stable.

It was a small group of Revver users that learned the truth: Revver wasn't broken, MySpace was blocking them.

This group of Revver users and content creators, led by content producers, including the popular "Ask A Ninja" guys, led a PR campaign to save Revver. On the Ninja blog, they plea to their fans:

Ask A Ninja was created because we were in control of where we posted the videos. That's a big deal because if we're forced to put them on MySpace video then FOX could take the episodes and make money off of them without paying Douglas or me anything. Which isn't fair and takes away the incentive to create cool shows for you to watch. Why is this against Net Neutrality? Because videos from Myspace Video and Youtube are not effected. It's only these smaller, more innovative companies that haven't been sold for billions of dollars. Here's what you can do: Copy this bulletin. Repost it. Blog about it. Make Tom put up a little fix it bulletin saying he's sorry..

So the fans blogged, they complained, and they urged others to complain, but it was to no avail.

As 2007 drew on, it quickly became the year of MySpace playing the big bully, attempting to destroy small and medium-sized companies they felt were competitive with their offerings.

Other companies got Revver's same treatment - Stickam and imeem to name a couple. MySpace even blocked Photobucket for a while - long enough for other investors to walk away - and then swooped in to buy the company for themselves.

Several URLs are still blocked on MySpace (for a complete list of URLs and blocked code, check out this site). MySpace continues to block Revver to this day.

Who's it going to be in 2008? We look at five possible contenders below, taking into consideration the special magic that is the SXSW experience. Lots of startups are hoping they'll go big next week in Austin, but in all likelihood only one, maybe two, actually will.

The event is huge, it's filled with creative people, the weather is warm and there's lots of parties. The panels are good enough to comment on but not so good that people aren't also communicating about a bunch of other things.

It's also more likely that someone will blow up at SXSW this year because of Twitter's high-profile success last year.

What does it take be a hit?

A winning app has to be easy for lots of people to use and has to provide clear value to conference and party-goers. It might seem valuable only at SXSW but end up proving itself afterwords due the scale achieved in Austin. That was the case with Twitter, which I and I'm sure others planned to stop using after SXSW. Photo by super-photographer Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

Buzz momentum leading up to the event is also very important. If a good number of savvy web lovers have just become power users of an app before SXSW, it stands a great chance of reaching critical mass there.

Finally, it has to perform reasonably well for a high-traffic week. Other than a underwhelming hallway demonstration, Twitter held up better at SXSW last week than it has at almost any time since.

So here are my favorites for possible breakout apps in Austin. What are yours?

The Contenders

Live streaming video
Qik, Mogulus, Ustream, BlogTV or Yahoo! Live

Live streaming video has built up a lot of interest in recent months, with the entry of big players and the announcement that Live YouTube is coming soon raising that interest to an all time high in recent weeks.

Live video is great for events because it leaves users feeling empowered and provides immediate feedback when you see how many people are watching your live feed.

Why this won't be it.

Live video is not easy for large numbers of people to use. Despite being easy to do, it's hard to do well and frequently. Most people aren't very good at it and anything but the right hardware equals fail in a public event setting.

AIR Twitter
Twhirl, Snitter

Third party Twitter clients built on Adobe's AIR are beautiful and compelling. They aren't believed until their seen. People in Austin will look over each others' shoulders and say "what is that?"

Twitter clients will probably grow in user numbers a lot before and after the conference sessions in Austin. I love Twitter and will be celebrating our first anniversary together in Austin.

Why this won't be it.

Don't count on anything Twitter working. Despite recent hires that were supposed to solve the scaling problems, Twitter will probably suffer extensive downtime during a week-long giant event. It is much, much bigger than it was last year, but you'll probably hear as much complaining about Twitter at SXSW as you will praise.

If Twitter can hold up that would be great, but desktop apps already have one strike against them at an event so dependent on mobile communication.

Alternatives to Twitter
Pownce

A more sophisticated but less used alternative to Twitter, Pownce could come in to fill the gap. It's already got a small but vocal fan club of web elite.

You may hear a lot of people saying in Austin, "that's it, I'm moving to Pownce."

Why this won't be it.

Twitter loyalty runs deep, even during the down times. Many people are unable to break the habit no matter how angry they (we) become. Pownce is a little more complicated and hasn't been experiencing a significant upturn leading up to SXSW.

Better conference resources
Sched.org

Sched is a just-released event schedule interface build by Taylor McKnight. The schedule part of the SXSW website is not good and Sched.org makes it a lot more usable. It's easy to dynamically plan out your day on Sched, selecting both official and unofficial events listed there. Then you can shoot the URL of your personal calendar off to a friend.

Sched creator Taylor McKnight is the man behind the geek-loved PodBop and the designer of version 2.0 of the Hype Machine. He and Sched co-creator Chirag Mehta also built Chime.tv, a feature rich video aggregator worth checking out.

These guys do smart little things, like letting you view group schedules by adding multiple usernames joined by commas in a Sched URL and offering a forehead slapping "why didn't I think of that" account creation and login proccess. A lot of people are already talking about Sched on Twitter and I expect it will get good traction in Austin. Here's my schedule, if you're interested. I haven't filled anything out yet.

Continued below screenshot

Why this won't be it.

Sched.org is more "wow" than it is seriously useful. People come and go from events at SXSW, schedules don't hold steady hour by hour. The site is also pretty slow and doesn't have the same social appeal or feature set as Upcoming does. Finally, nobody cares enough about what you're doing at SXSW to want a full copy of your scheduled panels and parties to attend. There are so many fun people there that it's better to just see who you get to see by chance. Except for you, Taylor McKnight, because you owe me a beer.

Activity feed aggregation/ Lifestreaming
FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a super simple way to view all your friends' activities on Twitter, del.icio.us, Mag.nolia, YouTube, Flickr and lots of other sites - all in one place. It's going to be great for SXSW. Flickr is a big part of tech events but FriendFeed is going to make it even bigger, with all of a photographer's friends seeing their photos - not just those that go to Flickr itself.

Friend discovery gets nailed in FriendFeed - plug in some accounts of yours around the web and it will recommend friends with similar interests all day long. That means rapid scale up in network effect and big ease of use. The "people who find you interesting" feature is really flattering and it's always good to appeal to the ego. Here's my ego on FriendFeed.

I've placed a link to FriendFeed in my browser toolbar and am already clicking on it throughout the day to see what my friends are bookmarking, what photos they're posting and to see a finite number of peoples' tweets. You can leave inline comments on any item's link in Friend feed or say you like a link of someone's with one click. It's already getting a lot of traction and I think it's going to blow up big in Austin.

More likely than Pownce, you're going to hear people saying that Twitter down-time is less of a bummer because the rest of FriendFeed is still available.

The service launched publicly this week, was founded by ex-Googlers and just announced $5 million in VC funding.

Smart, connected attendees of SXSW (and who doesn't want to be one of those?) are probably going to be dropping in at FriendFeed all week while half paying attention to panels. It's like Twitter but better in some ways; it's more expansive, more interactive and so far more stable.

Caveats and Pitfalls

FriendFeed might not scale well. There's not a mobile component. It's not the prettiest thing in the world to look at. There's no API so there's no ecosystem around it to make it more awesome - something that's been very important to Twitter's ongoing success.

Conclusion

The killer app in Austin might just be beer, it's hard to say. The time and conditions are right, though for somebody's service to prove itself on a big, important and informal stage though. Good luck to all the innovators looking for a good time at the conference.

This appears to be the first confirmation of such plans. YouTube live is probably going to be very big.

Robert Scoble asked Chen and Chad Hurley if live was in YouTube's future last month at CES. In that video, shot live on Scoble's mobile phone via Qik, the YouTube founders furtively replied that they "are working on a lot of things." Meyers got her answer at a YouTube party last week, but being the media-savvy upstart journalist that she is she sat on the footage until the 3rd day of her brand new show about internet micro-celebrities, Pop17. Keep your eyes peeled to see what Meyers comes up with next.

Can YouTube nail live? When Yahoo! launched its live video service earlier this month the site promptly choked on limited traffic. Perhaps YouTube will wait until it's got the scaling down right. Live video is easier said than done, on both sides of the camera, but has huge potential. Think of the impact that live TV has had and add the interactivity and democratization of online video publishing.

Given the way that YouTube's huge audiences draw many of the best recorded videos online today, it wouldn't be a surprise to see some very good live content there later this year. Can YouTube figure out a way to monetize the risk-laden world of live video? If anyone can, it could be the giant that's slowly figuring out how to monetize user generated video in general.