The keynote address for Macworld is in a few hours. Despite the lack of Steve Jobs, I’m excited as it’s not only Apple’s last Macworld — the site of many big product launches — but also my first.

I’ll be there covering the event for VetureBeat. Live-blogging a keynote — especially an Apple keynote — isn’t easy. The information comes at your quickly and you usually have to be doing about four things at once. But I’m really excited to try out FriendFeed’s new real-time feature to pipe in updates both into the FriendFeed room we set up and back to VentureBeat itself via an embedded widget.

I tested out the widget tonight and it’s really great. It updates in real-time as you add things to the FriendFeed room, so there is no need for page reloads. Also great is that you can comment right from within the widget (assuming you have a FriendFeed account).

FriendFeed has been an awesome tool in the past for live-blogging, we’ve used it a few times now. But this real-time feature, assuming it’s able to handle the furious pace that we’ll be working at tomorrow, is a potential game changer for the live-blogging space. Other sites have told me that were wary to use something like FriendFeed in the past because it takes pageviews away from their sites, but with such a functional embedded widget, I expect to see a few of them change their minds.

I’ll embed it on this site below as well just for the few of you that may want to follow the action tomorrow morning here. Or you can find the FriendFeed room itself here. Or just watch VentureBeat.

Predictions? Okay fine. I could do a wish-washy list like I did on VentureBeat when a lot of rumors will still gray, but instead I’ll just break them into two lists — what we will see and what we won’t see — based mostly on best guesses.

What we will see

• Updated iMacs
• New Mac minis
• New 17-inch MacBook Pros
• DRM-free iTunes
• A first real look at Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6)
• New iWork (and maybe iLife)

What we won’t see

• iPhone nano
• Apple netbook
• Apple home server thing
• Red iPhones
• New Mighty Mouse
• New Apple TV
• AT&T tethering plan

I’m probably leaving out a few rumored items that myself or others have written about in the past, but that breaks down pretty nicely. For what it’s worth, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber thinks there will be updates to the Apple TV and has a wildcard prediction that Apple shows off the iPhone OS 3.0. The latter would be pretty crazy, but he’s usually pretty good about predictions. Jason at Webomatica thinks the Apple TV could see an update as well. Perhaps me including it on the “won’t see” list is simply because I just bought one (and already almost need more than the 160GB).

[photo: flickr/Tom Coates]