Yet exactly how a company should integrate "real-time" into their service is something that's not always easy to grasp. It's clear that Facebook, for one, is still trying to figure it out.

In a Facebook blog post, the company announced that a limited, private beta of a new search interface is being rolling out to a small group of folks on the social network. The new interface will allow those fortunate enough to have access to it the ability to search for content from people, organizations, and other public figures as soon as they share it on Facebook. They'll also be able to search through their News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos, and notes for items being shared by friends, by pages of which they're a fan, or by those who have chosen to leave their profile open. Again, this is described as "up-to-the-minute" search results. In other words, Facebook is testing a real-time search engine.

Ironically, Facebook's other attempt at real-time didn't go quite as well. After March's site redesign which was responsible for the real-time stream of updates on users' homepages, Facebook faced protests by hundreds of thousands of users within days of the revamp. Apparently, those complaints didn't fall on deaf ears. According to a recent article on VentureBeat, Facebook is moving away from that real-time homepage stream, but towards what isn't exactly clear. All we know is that Facebook did acknowledge that their users "missed the News Feed in its former structure."

Real-Time: Good for Search, Not for Streams?

That just goes to show that real-time doesn't always make sense everywhere, in every service. Unlike FriendFeed, who boldly bet on real-time and made it the new default for their stream, mimicking that same feature over on Facebook was a recipe for disaster. (It could be argued that real-time updates don't work on FriendFeed either, but that may be just a personal opinion).

Even in Twitter, where information flows in immediately to the service, the Twitter.com homepage doesn't constantly auto-refresh for you, forcing you to see the updates as they happen. And Twitter desktop clients tend to poll for updates on a scheduled basis...so, not quite real-time there either.

Where real-time does work is search, something we've learned not only from using search.twitter.com but also from using some handy Twitter greasemonkey scripts that add Twitter results to a traditional search. (Here's one for Google and one for Bing).

It's also being rumored that Google may be working on a real-time search engine that would pull in results from Twitter and other microblogging sites. Perhaps "real-time" works in search because the stream is focused on one subject, not a chaotic mass of disjointed thoughts and links. Or then again, maybe it works because even though they're real-time, search results don't move across the screen in a constant flow - you have to refresh the page to see the new ones.

Questions about Real-Time

So does this mean that real-time doesn't work in streams but only in search? Can we just not process a rapidly updated flow quickly enough for it to make any sense? Or does it all come down to some magic number of people we follow that determines how much new input we can stand to see streaming by in real-time? Or maybe the problem is that real-time is simply too raw, without filters we miss seeing the updates that matter the most.

Do you agree? Or do you feel that real-time streams are indeed the future, but unfortunately the masses (as in the majority of Facebook users) just haven't gotten the hang of it yet. Or that real-time is just so new that no one has mastered the ideal UI for following a real-time flow?

It seems like we don't really have all the answers just yet, the only thing to do is experiment and see what works. Just like Facebook is doing now.

New Homepages

One highlight of the new homepages is a new 'publisher' feature which looks almost exactly like a similar feature on FriendFeed. Users can now easily post updates, notes, photos, and videos right from their homepage without having to go to the specific application first. In addition, users will now be able to easily filter their streams by specific friends, the type of relationship they have with people (groups), or by the application that generated the update.

Just like on FriendFeed, users can now easily block updates from others if they turn out to be spammers or are simply posting too few interesting (or too many) updates.

Followers on Facebook

Facebook has also lifted the 5,000 friend limit, which, according to Facebook, might mean that the definition of 'friendship' on Facebook could change in the long run. According to Facebook, only a very small percentage (less than 1/10 of a percent) of users currently hits the 5000 friend ceiling, but the company wants to give those users who want to share info with more than 5,000 users the option to do so.

Thanks to updates to Facebook's privacy settings, users will now also be able to follow others without having to become actual 'friends.' This is basically the same 'friendship' model that Twitter has implemented on its service.

Changes to Pages

Facebook also announced the rumored changes to its Facebook Pages. These pages currently allow brands, businesses, and celebrities to create a branded presence on Facebook, but they are separate entities from Facebook's regular profiles. Today, the new pages are going live for CNN, U2, and President Obama and will open up to all Pages users by March 11th. In the long run Facebook wants to converge everybody on the site to have the same type of presence, no matter if they are brands, celebrities, Robert Scoble, or just regular users.

Twitter Envy: Shifting Focus to Real-Time Updates

During today's press conference, Facebook's Chris Cox also talked a bit about how Facebook's focus has been changing from being a relatively static page to its users embracing the news feed as the central part of the site. Cox also strongly emphasized the real-time nature of the news feed. We couldn't help but think that Facebook is slowly moving towards combining some of the best features of FriendFeed and Twitter on its homepages as it has seen how quickly users latched on to Twitter and its real-time updates.

How Will Users React?

It will be interesting to see how Facebook's community reacts to these changes. It seems like Facebook purposely made this announcement a week before it is going live in order to prepare its users. After all, when Facebook first introduced the news feed in 2006, its users were anything but happy about this new feature. There will also be a preview site where users can familiarize themselves with the new homepage before they see it on their own page.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_announces_new_homepages.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_announces_new_homepages.php Facebook Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:24:29 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Imagine TweetDeck as an online application. Now imagine that you could use its paneled dashboard interface to keep tabs on your other online identities, too. With PeopleBrowsr, you can. This new application, currently in alpha, lets you update your networks, follow your friends, organize your favorites, and search for content across networks that include Twitter, flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, Seesmic, identi.ca, Photobucket, upcoming, and FriendFeed.

Keeping tabs on all the happenings across the social web can be a challenge. For some, FriendFeed is the destination of choice as it lets you see streams of information from all your friends as they share, comment, and participate in social media. Others find the application too noisy, as it requires a lot of manual tweaking and filtering to remove unwanted content.

A good alternative for those who want to keep up with the social web in a more organized fashion is PeopleBrowsr, a virtual dashboard for tracking your online identities. It's very much inspired by TweetDeck with panels that you scroll through horizontally. It also has a "Groups" feature, but its implementation was somewhat confusing. We'll give it a pass for now, though, as the application is still in alpha.

How To Use It

To get started with PeopleBrowsr, you simply add your online IDs and authorize the PeopleBrowsr service when necessary, as with flickr and YouTube. Once you're finished, you can then switch over to the PeopleBrowsr app itself.

There are actually two different views to choose from: the stream view (which resembles TweetDeck) and the Gallery view which lays out the avatars of your friends across the page. You must select your view of choice upon login. In the Gallery view, you can click on friends' avatars to see their latest updates and then interact with those updates accordingly, depending on what network you are browsing at the time.

To select the network you want to see, there's a navigation bar at the top left side of the page. You can scroll through the various online sites listed, selecting those you want displayed. In the Stream view, this is more practical as it loads up each new network in a separate panel, letting you then scroll horizontally from Twitter, to flickr, to YouTube, etc.

Your Streams

Each network provides different options for the types of views you can add to your paneled view. Clicking on the network from the navigation bar (see above) will add some default views to the window, but you can also choose to add other views from the navigation bar above the streams themselves. For Twitter, the views to choose from may include things like Replies and your Friends Timeline, for Flickr it includes options like Favorites and Friends' photos, and for YouTube, it includes your videos, your favorites, and so on.

PeopleBrowsr also has "PeopleTags" which let you tag friends in order to create cross-network groups. This feature wasn't entirely intuitive to use because the "My Groups" option appears at the top of the page even when no groups have been created. It seems to respond to a click but does nothing even though you're assuming that it will open up a pane for group creation as in TweetDeck. However, as you click on the individual posted items in your streams, you have the option of tagging them in order to create groups which then makes the "My Groups" link functional.

PeopleBrowsr Shows Promise

For an alpha app, this is a great first start. There are still some tweaks, like the Groups feature for example, that need to be made. Also, although it was possible to add a FriendFeed ID, FriendFeed did not appear in the top navigation for some reason. Without its inclusion, this would be an incomplete application. The app was also slow at times, once even crashing Firefox entirely. However, it's hard to tell for sure whether that's the app at fault or the pre-beta OS the testing was done on. That said, PeopleBrowsr definitely looks like a promising tool to organize your social streams in ways that make sense to you.