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FriendFeed, everyone’s favorite little social network that could, recently released the Real-Time Updates feature that allows you to watch live updating aggregation streams on the site. You can also take these streams and embed then on your own blog if you like. (I picked this up from Stevel Rubel)

This feature opens the door to many possibilities for livestreaming conversations about a particular topic, among a specific group of people and around certain events.

The first thing that I’ve found useful is creating an auto-updating news ticker, which I keep in my Firefox browser to stay on top of what all my FF friends are doing. And to show you how I did it, I created the following video so you can too!

How To Use FriendFeed as a News Ticker from shawn smith on Vimeo.

How is the FriendFeed News Ticker Useful?

If you monitor a niche or beat, the FriendFeed news ticker allows you to keep a steady steam of information coming in at you as soon as it is aggregated. Think of it as an up-to-the-minute aggregator for just about any content on the web – from blog posts to Twitter tweets to Facebook updates.

This can bring all the interesting things right in front of you and you don’t have to hunt around for it or wait for someone else to post it first.

This news ticker can also be used to embed the aggregate streams from within FriendFeed rooms. This is cool because if you can create a decent community in a FF room, you can build a widget and embed the auto-updating stream on your own site. Think of it as a Twitter topic embed on steroids. With the right amount of adoption (which won’t be overnight), this would be a fun experiment for Election night coverage.

Give it a try and let me know what you think?