ReadWriteWeb

FriendFeed has recently launched a search feature, and so Facebook search must be coming soon.

Real-time Web search (of streams of activities) is a hot topic right now. Everyone, including Google and Microsoft, recognizes the value of using trusted contacts as filters. What was once called social search is now called real-time search, but this time it will really happen. First, it will be applied to streams and then to the Web in general.

What we are about to get is a Social Relevancy Rank. Whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph. That is, people who matter more to you will bubble up. How does this work? Well, there will be a formula, just as there is a formula for Page Rank.

In December, Movable Type announced a new product called "Motion," which integrates activity streams, microblogging, and portable identities into a software package that can be installed into the company's hosted publishing platform, Movable Type Pro. Now, after much testing and feedback, Motion for Movable Type has become publicly available. With this software, built on open standards, blogs can add social activity streams to their site. These are similar in appearance to those from the social web aggregation service FriendFeed, but are entirely within the blog owner's control. Motion also adds a social networking element to online communities with its user profiles and authentication tools that permit signing in from any provider, including Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, or OpenID.

Recently, Facebook added a new feature to its News Feeds: a "like" button. Now, rather than leaving a throw-away or otherwise unnecessary comment on a friend's status update, you can show your appreciation by just clicking "like" instead. Sound familiar? If not, then it's clear you haven't tried FriendFeed FriendFeed, the social web aggregation service popular among early adopters.

As avid users of FriendFeed will tell you, Facebook's implementation of FriendFeed's features are nothing but a pale imitation of the real thing. Still, there's a growing concern among the service's fans about its sustainability. Although FriendFeed's founders believe they can still innovate to profitability, we're no longer sure that's true.

Open web enthusiast Todd Ronin has published a cool mock-up animation of what an "activity stream" might look like on an Android phone. The design is simple but is something we can imagine enjoying on our phones, a lot.

Android is Google's super-open mobile operating system that hasn't moved the needle yet, but is great for discussions like this and could end up much bigger than the iPhone. Activity Streams are the rivers of updates on what you and your friends are doing across different social networks. Most of the major social networking vendors are working hard to figure out what kind of standards could allow these activity streams to flow freely from one site to another. Here's one vision of what that could look like on your phone.

Last night at the offices of blogging software company Six Apart, engineers and social media specialists from a number of companies large and small met to discuss proposed standards for the future of "activity streams" - the system of displaying recent activities of your friends online. Think Facebook Newsfeed, the basic format of FriendFeed, or the kinds of update chronicles we're seeing now on almost every social network around the web.

What do you get when you combine blogging and lifestreaming? You get Kakuteru, a semantic blogging mashup with funny name. The service imports your activity streams from FriendFeed and combines them with longer articles you write yourself. After you set up your Kakuteru site, its URL can then be hidden behind a domain name of your choosing so it appears as if it's your own blog.

The cyn.in desktop client from a company called Cynapse is a new application that brings microblogging to the corporate desktop. Powered by Adobe AIR, the client is intended to improve collaboration between teams through its real-time "Activity Stream" of events which makes communication quick and easy.