In case you’ve been avoiding the Internets today, this morning (on the West Coast) saw the Philnote at MacWorld Expo 2009. As I write this, it’s been done for a half hour; though if you’ve been following it on Twitter, Tony Bennett is just now starting up. Right now, my timeline’s about 37 minutes behind. It’s better than nothing; I’m still getting my replies in real-time, but if you were hoping to follow Macworld on Twitter, it’s clear that it just doesn’t fly. There was a similar issue on election night when Obama claimed the presidency.

Instead, I followed the keynote in a real-time Apple room on FriendFeed. While there were occasional hiccups where I’d get a ton of stuff dumped on me at once, FriendFeed continued to demonstrate excellent performance under duress. And, real-time interactivity with “likes” and comments on FriendFeed enables discussion that Twitter simply can’t, especially when it’s running a half-hour behind. So, I think it’s worth saying that this time around, FriendFeed made following the event easier and more intuitive, not to mention that it stayed on pace with the event.

I’ll give Twitter one thing: At least it didn’t crash. That’s a huge improvement over last year. It’s clear there’s still more work to do to improve capacity, though. Here’s a status update from Twitter regarding the timeline issue.

Update: The Twitter API has given up the ghost.