Build a Real-Time News Ticker with Friendfeed

I have written before about how to use Friendfeed's powerful imaginary friends feature as an aggregator. Now that they have real-time updating and lists, you can actually combine these to build a handy desktop news ticker.

First, create a bunch of imaginary friends for the different news sources you want to follow. Assign each to a relevant Twitter profile. For example, I have three imaginary friends: The New York Times (Twitter), Techmeme Firehose (on Twitter) and Breaking News (on Twitter).

Next, add these to a special Friendfeed list. I rolled them up in a list called News.

Now click on the real-time link on this list page, open the mini window and bingo. You can also bookmark it so that it runs in your Firefox sidebar. Here's the result.

Comments

[Philippe]

good idea! ...or you could create a room which imports some news sources and invite your friendfeed friends to join it. I just created one importing tweets from Breaking News, the Rss feed from Google news for articles, and youtube videos from nocomment tv. If lots of people join that room, comments and likes can make the realtime feature very interesting too. well, it wouldn't be for the desktop but an interesting place to see news comments.

How about joining the experience? http://friendfeed.com/rooms/news-en I'd be happy to share my administrator rights if you have any good suggestions of sources to add. how about a flickr stream related to the news... couldn't find that.

it could be an awesome newspaper 2.0!