Introduction

Back in the old days, towns had “town criers”, whose job was to inform the villagers of news. In the modern era, town criers aren’t exactly needed. However, we still need to get news, and popular tech blogs like Engadget often act like town criers and tell everybody what’s going on at WWDC. During the WWDC keynote speech, Robert Scoble was sitting in an Apple store, and realized that FriendFeed was perfect for the coverage of WWDC. You can find the FriendFeed room covering WWDC here. I would have to agree with him, but unfortunately, I did watch the FriendFeed rooms for WWDC coverage. I was busy looking at the Engadget website. So here’s my own breakdown of why FriendFeed was the better choice for liveblogging events like WWDC.

FriendFeed vs. Twitter vs. Blogs

This will compare the FriendFeed rooms against Twitter and blogs like Engadget mentioned above.

Ability to get coverage fast

FriendFeed: FriendFeed wins here. It’s very easy to post new items to FriendFeed. It has Twitter’s simplicity, but is faster than Twitter.

Twitter: Twitter shot itself in the foot by limiting the API request rate. If you were using a Twitter client, you would only be able to get new updates once every six minutes. That’s horrible for covering a live event in this modern age.

Blogs: Posting to a blog is more difficult than posting on FriendFeed or Twitter. The user interface is better suited for things other than liveblogging.

Ability to get input from the community

FriendFeed: FriendFeed’s comments mechanism is best suited to this. You can comment on every individual FriendFeed entry.

Twitter: Twitter has to do the worst here. The best you can do is @replies, which are not best suited to having other people be able to read you user input.

Blogs: Posting to a blog is more difficult than posting on FriendFeed or Twitter. The user interface is better suited for things other than liveblogging.

Ability to post other media (pictures, video clips, etc.)

FriendFeed: As the VentureBeat (the folks behind the room) said in their post they were missing a way to directly post media to FriendFeed.

Twitter: Twitter would have about the same difficulty as FriendFeed with posting media.

Blogs: Plenty of blogging applications have the ability to upload images. Blogs win here.

Ability to display rich text

FriendFeed: FriendFeed Rooms do not have the ability to format things as rich text.

Twitter: Twitter does not either.

Blogs: Blogs win here with advanced rich text capabilities. However, you have to question if it’s necessary. I mean, isn’t the idea just to get the news fast and not worry about some pretty formatting?

Conclusion

Well, it seems clear that FriendFeed is really good for liveblogging, but it needs to borrow a trick or two from the blog world.