Reason #552 to Be on FriendFeed: Real-Time Search

I’ve talked in the past about how I read your blogs. I rarely subscribe through Google Reader any more – I read all of your blogs through FriendFeed. Therefore if you want me to read your blog, I strongly suggest taking the first step of importing it into FriendFeed. Well, if that weren’t reason enough, FriendFeed just gave you even one more reason to import your blog and other social data into their site: real-time search.

If you’ll look down in the lower-right sidebar of this blog, you’ll see an example of it in action – every mention of “realtime”, “real time”, “social”, “friendfeed”, “twitter”, “facebook”, or “Jesse Stay” anywhere on the web, at any time that has been imported into FriendFeed now appears real-time, as it’s happening.  Go ahead – change the search parameters to something like “earthquake”, or “iran”, or “michael jackson”.  You’ll quickly see the value of having such real-time, on-demand search at your fingertips.

FriendFeed is said to be getting ready to also release notifications, probably in the same way they do your other friend lists and feeds via e-mail and IM for the various search terms you’re trying to find.  As the terms come in real-time, you’ll receive them.  This is powerful stuff!

Over a year ago Twitter had a similar feature – they called it “track”, which they’ve recently re-introduced to developers via their API.  It was the main reason I joined and stuck with Twitter.  As soon as their competition was dead they removed it.  It looks as though FriendFeed has one-upped Twitter once again with this feature.

So if you haven’t already, go to FriendFeed, get an account, import all your Twitter and Facebook friends already on the service (you’ll find most of your active friends probably already are!), and start adding your blogs, Twitter feeds, facebook feeds, photos, videos, and more into your stream so they too can be indexed by this powerful search.  The web just got a whole lot more real-time, and FriendFeed just got a whole lot more powerful.