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One of the new features appeared in the new Facebook interface is the Live Feed. Through this functionality, you can get a realtime update of your friends’ activities, wathever they are doing within Facebook or in other services integrated with it (Twitter, Friendfeed, Applications etc.).

How far is this new service from FriendFeed? I’d say really not much. You can filter the type of updates you want to get and leave comments to those. Or you can even get the updates coming from Friendfeed only too. The only missing feature is the “Like” one, something that lets Friendfeed bring the most “liked” stories (as well as the most commented ones) to the top, giving them a “rate” in terms of popularity.

The real question here is how many virtual worlds users would deal with. Facebook is a huge online operating system with an enormous user base, so why I should care to FriendFeed too? And, if it weren’t enough, you can take a look at Pulse or MyBlogLog for other interesting updates from your contacts.

The only difference among these “status updates” should be the type of contacts those updates belong to. MyBlogLog brings together the community of readers of your blog, Pulse is more a business thing (is it?) while Facebook IS “THE” social network (LinkedIn has its “What are you working on” thing, too). The risk is that with the “status update mania” some services could loose their focus and, time after time, becoming something different (look at MyBlogLog, for instance).

The other important thing that is worth to be pointed out is that, at the end of the day, we are always dealing with the same contacts everywhere, so how to avoid duplicate content in this already crowded digital social universe? Friendfeed is the best example here. People updating their status with services like Ping.fm or HelloTXT are filling FriendFeed with the same content coming from different sources, so I find an entire page where my friend XYZ tells me that he’s doing this or that, with different icons representing the different services he is updating. So what? Boring.

That being said, only time will tell, but it’s pretty clear that users start looking for a sort of “social networks consolidation” and for an efficient way to limit the enormous quantity of content they consume everyday. Me too… what about you?

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Technorati Tags: facebook, friendfeed, Hellotxt, Jaiku, Live Feed, luca filigheddu, Ping.fm, Social network, status update, twitter