How to get real-time Facebook and Twitter feeds to appear in your browser

An American-based company called lu.ly has introduced the first cross-browser extension that lets users see real-time Twitter and Facebook updates within their browser.

Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari users can download and install the lu.ly browser extension (from http://lu.ly/) to see real-time updates from both Twitter and Facebook friends in one place. Once installed in the browser, (a restart is required) new status updates and tweets scroll across the lu.ly bar as soon as they are posted.

If you blink and miss an update, you can simply click on the small green back button (located to the right of the updates) to navigate through your history. Users can also use the lu.ly bar to post their own updates directly to their social networking accounts, to send private messages, to retweet a message or to directly reply to a friend's tweet.

"Today over 400M users worldwide visit facebook and Twitter to see their friends' activities," wrote lu.ly in an October 25 press release. "The growth in popularity of the real-time web has proven that it's no longer enough to get information periodically, but users want updates as they happen. Lu.ly helps meet this demand, by providing friend updates to users in real-time, wherever users are on the web."

Other lu.ly features include an integrated URL shorten, a search box, and a space to leave feedback and report bugs.

While lu.ly is the only service that is currently compatible with different browsers, there are many alternative extensions for Mozilla's Firefox that will enable you to view real time updates in your browser. A service called Friendbar lets you to view incoming tweets and send out your own updates from within your Firefox toolbar while an extension called Twitter StatusBar discreetly sits in your status bar until you want to tweet.

To search for additional social networking add-ons for Firefox, head to https://addons.mozilla.org.

Site: http://lu.ly/