You’ve seen Twitter’s election feature that showed a select kind of tweet in real time. A few minutes ago FriendFeed released a real-time-web feature that lets you watch FriendFeed in real time. This is fun to watch! Especially on nights where everyone will be giving you their opinions on politics. More about this on FriendFeed’s blog. Of course we’re talking about this on FriendFeed too and on cofounder Bret Taylor’s feed.

Unlike Twitter’s page, which only shows Tweets, FriendFeed’s “real time web” shows you everything that people are doing on the Web including, but not limited to, videos, photos, blogs, event calendar items, tweets, and other things.

This is wild. It’s like the web has been turned into a chat room.

What do you think? Keep in mind that unlike a chat room each item you are seeing here has its own URL, its own RSS feed, and its own place on the Web. Also, unlike a chat room each item here can be commented on live, or you can like it, which will push it to the top of the old fashioned FriendFeed page.

This is also functionality that Facebook or MySpace does not have.

UPDATE: you can also see other people’s views of FriendFeed this way. Here, you can view my feed (which only includes about 3,500 people): http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/friends/realtime

You can also view rooms this way. For instance, if you want to watch just the political room tonight as the debates go on, visit here: http://friendfeed.com/rooms/2008-debates/realtime

First bit of feedback after watching for a few minutes. Now we REALLY need to be able to talk to the database! I’d love to be able to say “show me all items that have the word ‘obama’ in them, but also that have two or more likes.” Imagine if you could do that. Wow.

Analysis: I still like the old style of reading FriendFeed better. Why? Because each comment cluster is threaded together so you get the context. Things aren’t moving so reading is easier too.

Compare the real time pages above to these:

http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer (my FriendFeed account, which shows everything I’ve put into the system).
http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/discussion (the page that shows everything I’ve liked and commented on).

Have you checked out PageOnce on your iPhone yet? In just three months they are one of the top 10 productivity apps and 200,000+ have downloaded it. Here’s Guy Goldstein, CEO, telling me about the company and giving me a demo on last Friday’s WorkFastTV show.

One thing I learned is that this week they are shipping a version of this popular app on Blackberry mobile phones too.

What makes it a great productivity app? It lets you see all sorts of personal information. Your bank balances. Your stock plans. Your credit card accounts. Your Netflix account. Your favorite airlines. And a lot more. All in one screen and it warns you when you have bills due. Great stuff for keeping up to date on your finances.

Frank Shaw answers back. He’s the head of Microsoft’s account at Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft’s main PR firm (and has been for years). Frank’s one of the smartest guys in the PR business, so it’s good for him to step in here. He basically has a finger lashing for everyone involved in yesterday’s incident, including me. I just saw his post in Google Reader, and added this note to it when I put it on my shared items blog:

Frank runs PR for Microsoft for Waggener Edstrom. He takes me to task. Fair enough. I over reacted a bit, mostly because employees were saying that what they said on blogs and on Twitter doesn’t reflect back on their companies, even if they try to disclaim that it’s their opinions. Sorry, that’s just not true. I didn’t make that point well, though, and over reacted. I’m still not going to PDC, it just isn’t high enough value for me. Same reason I’m not going to Apple’s PR thing in the morning. Engadget will beat me all over the place and I don’t have a team to tackle the event. At conferences I rarely get video that fits FastCompany.tv’s style — this year I’ve been to dozens of conferences. How many have you seen video from? Very few.”

To other Microsoft employees, I apologize. Glad to see that Frank addressed this in public.

My feelings got stirred up quite a bit by being on Gillmor Gang and hearing the other participants in the call saying they thought it affected their perception of Microsoft in a negative way, so I figured I’d make a point to get a discussion going. It did that, for sure, and for doing that I’ve done myself some harm. I’ll lick my wounds and come back at it tomorrow.