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.