The real-time web is the buzzword of 2009. As technology advances, we become more impatient. We want our information and we want it 5 minutes ago. If a story is reported 2 hours after it happens, it’s ancient history in the age of Twitter and FriendFeed. I’m a big user of FriendFeed not only for the information it brings, but the interesting discussions that occur surrounding them. It’s a great dashboard of the social web.

FriendFeed has a real-time feature that some are not aware of. This feature is available for FriendFeed lists, rooms, and your friend streams. It shows FriendFeed activity as it happens and can be addictive if you let it Today, I found (through FriendFeed of course) a little nugget that allows you to embed your friends real-time activity right on your blog. To do so:

1. Navigate to your page by clicking “Me” on the left sidebar. Then click “Yourname + Friends” on the top tab bar
   
2. Next, click the “Real time” link, and then click embed in web page
   
3. You can then configure the embed width, height, and title. Copy and paste the HTML to your blog and you’re set.
   

I was aware you could embed real-time FriendFeed through rooms, as I wrote about back in May, but I didn’t know you could also embed your friend stream. Here’s what mine looks like:

As of now, you cannot embed your main feed, or your discussion feed which consists of your comments and likes. That would be the next logical feature to add since the FriendFeed discussion feed is rich with content that you are interested in. Take a look at mine to get an idea. I’m glad FriendFeed is continuing to improve and if you want the world to know what you’re doing on FriendFeed at any given moment, go ahead and embed your FriendFeed activity. See you on FriendFeed.

Related posts:

• 4 Ways to Enhance Your Blog With FriendFeed
• 7 Ways To Harness The Power Of Real-time FriendFeed
• The Challenge Of The Realistic Real-Time Web

FriendFeed is great mechanism for sharing information and discussing topics around the social web. I’ve blogged about it before, and so have many others. There are many people who have successfully embedded Twitter statuses in their blog as well as other RSS information. The term “Lifestream” has been chosen to denote updates from your “social graph” and many have implemented this idea on their blog, including myself. In this post, I’ll explain multiple ways to add FriendFeed information to your blog. Note, these have been tested on WordPress 2.5.x and should work on other platforms unless noted otherwise.

1. Add the official FriendFeed widget to your blog. This is done by navigating to http://www.friendfeed.com/embed, and then inserting the supplied code to your blog.
   
   
   
   
   

   You can install this in your sidebar or on a dedicated page simply by copying and pasting the code supplied in your blog template.

2. Modify the official FriendFeed widget to embed certain services to your blog. I learned this yesterday from Paul Buchheit. You can filter which services you wish to embed by modifying the embed URL:
   
   <script type="text/javascript" src="http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget/bwana?
num=2&service=twitter"></script>
   
   The items in bold in the above example denote the username, the number of items and the service name respectively. This particular widget will show the last two Twitter entries for username bwana. This is powerful in that it shows the latest service entry as well as the first few FriendFeed comments. The service names can be internal (FriendFeed messages), blog, lastfm, seesmic, googlereader, and so on. To get the name of the service, go over to FriendFeed and hover over the service icon and look at the URL. This is what an embed looks like for Twitter:
   
   
   
   
   
3. Embed your latest FriendFeed messsage text only. There are multiple ways to do this, but thanks to Benjamin Golub, I’ve found the feed supplied by the API is the easiest way. The first thing to do is to determine your FriendFeed ATOM URL from the API. It is of the format
   
   http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/user?nickname=[YOURNICKNAME]
&service=[SERVICE]&output=atom&num=[COUNT]
   
   My URL is
   
   http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/user?nickname=bwana
&service=internal&output=atom&num=1
   
   Once you have established your feed URL, use your favorite RSS/Atom plugin to embed it in your blog. For WordPress, the RSS widget should work fine. My favorite is feedlist. With my blog, I simply put the following in my template where I wanted the update:
   
<?
feedList(array("rss_feed_url"=>"http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/
user?nickname=bwana&service=internal&output=atom&num=1","before"=>"", "after"=>"", "ignore_cache"=>"30"));
?>

   I like feedlist because it gives you a great deal of control on how to handle the feed output. The resulting output looks like:
   
   
   
   
   

   Again, you can place this anywhere in your blog. I put it at the very top of my index page above all blog posts.
   
   [Update] – Magpie (which is built into WordPress now it seems) chokes on FriendFeed entries that are shared with an image or media attached. I’m looking into finding a workaround or solution in the meantime.

4. Add FriendFeed “comments” and “likes” to your blog posts. Unfortunately, this solution only works with WordPress. Louis Gray and Thomas Hawk are very interested in someone writing something for Blogger. This involves installing the FriendFeed WordPress plugin by Glenn Slaven. After installing and enabling the plugin, comments made in FriendFeed will be shown on your blog posts. Users can also directly comment to FriendFeed from your blog post. This is very powerful if you wish to combine your own blog comments with FriendFeed comments. This is what it looks like:
   
   
   
   
   
   

These are my favorite ways to enhance my WordPress blog with FriendFeed, and I’m quite sure there are more ways to do it. What ways have you enhanced your blog with FriendFeed? Has it worked? Leave a comment here or on FriendFeed.

Related posts:

• Embed Your Real-time FriendFeed Activity On Your Blog
• Feedly’s FriendFeed Aggregation [Do Want]
• 7 Ways to Utilize FriendFeed Rooms