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When Facebook updated its users' homepages last week, we already wondered how users would react to these changes. After all, when Facebook introduced the news feed in 2006, its users were anything but happy about this change. Now, a new application is quickly spreading on Facebook that allows users to vote on the new design. This application is not endorsed by Facebook, but the current vote totals are quite interesting: 43,000 users liked the new layout, while almost 700,000 users said that they did not like it.

An upcoming feature for Android smartphones called "Live Folders" will deliver real-time web updates to the phone's homescreen.  Recently, this feature was revealed in a video of "Cupcake," a development branch of Google's mobile OS where new additions and changes are tested prior to being ported over to the main Android platform.

Friendfeed, the popular social media aggregator, just released an Adobe Air application that displays real-time updates from your friends right on your desktop. Whenever one of your friends posts a new item or leaves a comment, a message will appear on your desktop. Friendfeed is clearly making real-time updates a core feature of its service, as it already offers real-time updates in its web interface and through IM.

One of the most interesting trends on the Internet right now is a move towards a more real-time experience. We have seen a lot of discussion lately about how Twitter is leading the charge by creating a search engine for the real-time web, for example. However, there are also a good number of other services that already expose some of the promises of the real-time web. In this post, we will have a look at some of the most interesting ones.

Surchur, a web, blog, image, video, and social media search engine, has just relaunched their online dashboard. The company calls this an "update," but it's more like an overhaul of their earlier product. Launched back in spring of 2008, Surchur's original homepage was barely even worthy of a mention, much less of use. But today, the company's "dashboard to the now" delivers a well-designed and comprehensive view into the "real-time web" - that is, what's happening on the internet right now.

Zcapes is a new "augmented reality" application that lets you instantly transform any object or event into a mini blog using your mobile phone. But this is no ordinary blogging platform. Instead of focusing on publishing, Zcapes focuses on integrating streams from the "Live Web" into whatever blog you create. The end result is a Zcape page that taps into the real-time conversations surrounding an event, activity, thing, or group.