A while back Loic Le Meur wrote a post discussing how his social map is decentralized. He also urged others to create their own social maps. Several folks have since created them using wildly different visual ways to interpret and display them using a variety of tools.
Loic used pen and paper for his original version
Stowe Boyd created what he calls a social mapplication using a timeline model
So I found this to be very interesting and decided to create my own soicial map. I also thought it would be helpful to proivde some tips for others who wanted to do the same. The first decision to make was which tool I would use. As with others, I felt that the best way to create it would be by using a Mind Mapping tool.
I did however have some specific requirements:
Had to be an online Mind Mapping Service
Had to be free
Ability to import images
Ability to add external links
Ability to share the Mind Maps
I found the ultimate resource to do my research in the way of a Mashable post on 30+ Mind Mapping Tools. I tried all of the free online services and after weighing my requirements and the features of the various services I felt that Mindomo offered the best solution. If you don’t care about importing images (and frankly it’s a bit time consuming) another service that many others have liked is MindMeister.
So before creating my social map I had to decide on what hierarchical method I wanted to use for creating it. I decided to choose categories that are defined by my interaction methods. That also meant that some services may fall into multiple areas of interaction. I decided on four categories. Create, Consume, Connect, and Communicate
Next up was providing the method of interaction occurring for each category as well as the services associated with it. So for instance, I had a caegory called “Create”. I then had an interaction for that method called “Comments” and under that interaction I listed 4 services that I use with links to my profiles or where the content lived on the service.
I also created some extended definitions for several services. I primarily use Twhirl to post to Twitter, but I also use it to cross-post to Pownce & Jaiku as well, so that interaction is listed on the map. Another extension is for services that offer multiple methods of displaying user data. You can see the examples I use for Last.fm & Goodreads. I also go on to mention applications that I use to enable functions in my social map such as Trillian for IM, Outlook for email, and Skype for video.
Here is an image of the finished product linked to the map on Mindomo
Click to view interactive map on Mindomo
Overall I found the exercise interesting to get a visual of how we leave our footprint on the web as it relates to Lifestreaming and get more insight into our actions. I also realize that this map is just a current snapshot and it can easily change over time. It gets me thinking of other creative ways I can add to it and I just realized I could have added Yelp under Consume for Food. Oh well, I definitely plan on revisiting the map to see how it changes over time.
Twitterlocal.net is a site that lets you find local Twitter users based on proximity to a given location. They got mentioned quite a bit on Twitter today due to a newly created leader board that shows a breakdown of locations with the most tweets over the last 24 hours. The way it works is you supply the location in the form of a zip code or city / state combo along with a selected range within # of miles and it returns a list of the top tweeters in the area.
I decided I wanted to find all users from my city. So I went ahead and entered Chatsworth CA with a range of 1 mile (the minimum). The results came back with only 2 users, myself and 1 other user. Turns out the results only shows users who have sent a tweet within a 24 hour period. It got me thinking about how I can find all users from my city. I couldn’t find a service that does this though, so I had an idea.
I figured I could come up with query to Google to find this so I went ahead and created this query “site:twitter.com location chatsworth ca“. I figured I’d query the profile pages of all Twitter users who supplied their location. Sure enough I got more records. It returned 5 users. This seems to be a nice little hack to find users of your city until Twitterlocal.net offers to show all users or another site comes along that does.
I’ve provided little nuggets of info sprinkled in many posts regarding my insights as to why I’ve always felt the Lifestreaming concept was great. What I’ve never done though, is provide a post telling others why they should be Lifestreaming as well.
When I first began covering Lifestreaming, there weren’t any services. In fact there were only a few plugins or scripts that were fairly difficult to setup allowing you to create a self hosted Lifestream. This really limited the scope of people creating them to a small number of tech savvy folks. Here we are just over a year later and anyone can create a rich Lifestream in 10 minutes.
As Lifestreaming has grown in popularity the number of people criticizing the reasoning for creating them has also grown. Many people just don’t get it while others feel it’s just a form of Narcicism which is just a grown up word for when we called people in high school conceited. These folks are just a bunch of haters. I’m here to try and provide several compelling reasons to shut them all up once and for all.
Reason #1 - You create a Lifetream for the benefit of others
Yes, Lifestreaming is done for the benefit of others. Before you break out a whatchya talkin’ bout Willis on me, let me explain. When we hang out with friends in the real world, we may talk about music we’re listening to, movies we’ve watched, places we’ve been, photos we’ve taken, videogames we’ve played, books we’ve read, ,what we’ve been up to and so much more. Lifestreaming offers the ability to create a digital form of this information. The beauty is that we now have many web services that can provide every piece of data in the real world scenario mentioned above. Once the web services are setup, the data is added automatically in a passive manner. Viewing others Lifestreams then become human powered recommendation engines. The data can also provide distant friends & family a window into our lives, or offer great up to date context for enriching conversations when we see them in the real world. These are just some methods that provide value to others.
Reason #2 - To build, control, and promote your online identity
Lifestreaming has become an amazing vehicle that has been turning people into brands. Lifestreaming allows you to paint the picture of who you are to others. You can promote your knowledge in an area filling the services that make up your Lifestream with the content you create and consume to reflect it. Soon enough you will gain readership as an expert in your field and grow a following. Lifestreaming can also be a great way to promote your business, product, blog, etc… If done correctly, this can become a very valuable tool in your social media arsenal.
Reason # 3 - Lifestreams have created a new subscription model
Ok here’s another major development that I believe is causing a paradigm shift. I was an early adopter when it came to RSS. I subscribed to, and consumed most of my information using an RSS reader. It was definitely my primary source for getting data from the web. Even so, it’s impossible to consume it all. We’ve seen some nice developments in services that are using algorithms to filter RSS content for us.
That’s pretty good, but I have now seen a shift where I’m spending more time reading Lifestreams than RSS feeds. Why is this? Because I now primarily subscribe to people instead of RSS feeds. The primary reason is that by building the right subscription recipe of people instead of RSS feeds, I’m now leveraging the ultimate human filtering algorithm to bring me the wisdom of the masses. By selectively following those who are sharing bookmarks, Tweets, RSS shared items, and more, for my areas of interest, I am increasing the chance of having creme of the crop content delivered to me. This shift is treating people as a valued commodity ahead of the content. Yes this is a new concept, but I think it’s starting to happen.
I also want to clarify that I’m not saying Lifestreams should replace reading RSS feeds. Just stating that I’m personally using the human filter before I make my way to an RSS reader. I have mad respect for RSS as it’s one of the essential platforms and was the primary catalyst enabling Lifestreams in the first place.
Reason #4 - Create a personal digital archive of your life
Lifestreams are becoming interactive digital diaries of our lives. While we still have a ways to go for this to become a reality, I see it coming. I can envision a future where I’m reminiscing about my past, going through my Lifestream and re-living old memories. You could locate notable dates in history to see what you were doing & what was on your mind. After we have passed, our great great grandchildren could get a much better understanding of who we were by navigating our historical Lifestream. I can see amazing future applications where you navigate a digital family tree and can drill down on individuals and then start navigating through their Lifestream.
Still not convinced?
Well these are just a few reasons that I could put some thought behind. I’m sure I’ll come up with more and continue updating the list.
Do you have a good reason why people should Lifestream? Post it in the comments and let others know why they should be doing this.
There are many Lifestreaming sites that offer widgets & badges to place on your website but often they are limiting. So often many folks will choose a Lifestreaming service to use but opt for their own plugin or script to host a Lifestream on their own site. Still this method can be a bit painful as most plugins require a bit more work to get setup and often don’t offer support for the variety of sites that you may want to use.
For those of you in this quandry the proverbial killing two birds with one stone has been delivered with the new WP-Profilactic Wordpress plugin written by Anish H. Patel. It makes it very easy to host your own rich Lifestream on your own site. All you have to do is create an account and build your Lifestream on Profilactic where you can add from their unmatched support for up to 175 sites to your Lifestream.
After you’re done with the account creation you just download & install the plugin, provide your Profilactic account credentials, and then add a small snippet of code to a new template file or use the one provided. Yes, it’s that easy, no muss, no fuss. You also have the option of customizing the plugin with some options regardin number of posts to display, colors, etc.
You can check out a rich example of the plugin in action with 28 services on author Anish Patel’s site here. Also, be sure to check out my Profilactic page here. And if you want to keep up to date on Profilactic and their never ending service additions you can follow user Profilactic on Twitter.
The artwork above was created by Paul Downey aka Flickr user psd. He also wrote a post on his inspiration for the piece here where he discusses his views on each of the technologies portrayed in the picture.
After reading it I also came across his unique self-hosted Lifestream here which is powered by the Planet Venus feed reader. His Lifestream offers exporting of OPML, FOAF, and an aggregated RSS feed.
If you’ve read this blog for a while you’ll also remember that back in January I too felt this was the year that Lifestreaming would really take off.
Dipity is a new service that has come out that allows you to create both the prettiest and visually functional timeline I have yet to see on the web. The timeline can be created to represent any historic information. They currently have over 20,000 timelines that cover a broad range of themes. Timelines are created either by entering items manually, or by adding a feed. That’s where the Lifestreaming aspect of building a timeline comes into play. They currently support the ability to import from Picasa, Twitter, Pandora, Wordpress.com, Last.fm, Flickr, Yelp, Blogger, Youtube, and any other supplied RSS Feed.
After you’ve given Dipity your data it quickly generates the visual timeline for you. The timeline allows multiple zoom levels by length of time displayed. You then scroll horizontally across your timeline, as well as click on individual items within it. Items within the timeline are shown using varying sizes and clicking on smaller items zooms them in along with the timeframe of the timeline. Once an individual items is clicked on it will display details and images if available as well as link to where the source data lives if pulled in from a feed.
This functionality is a bit hard to describe so thankfully they offer the ability to embed. Below I have provided a rich example of a timeline for the discography of Depeche Mode
Along with the timelines, they also offer three other methods to view the data. List view is a more traditional chronological view, Flipbook view is a coverflow type method, and Map View offers a world map view if the items are geo tagged.
If you’re a fan of nice visual interfaces and want to experiment with a totally different visual representation of your Lifestream, this service is worth taking a look at. You can take a look at the Lifestream Timeline I created here.
If you want to take a look at some other services that offer a less functional timeline, but a richer a Lifestreaming experience, take a look at Dandelife & iStalkr
Lastly, if you are really interested in timelines, there is a very popular code project called Simile Timeline that you can use to create your own as well.
For me it has gotten to the point where I can’t really effectively keep track of all the people I’m following on Twitter as well as several other social & Lifestreaming services. The other day I stated that Twitter really needs to add a feature allowing us to put followers into groups for filtering. Loic Le Meur sent out a tweet stating that he was planning on creating a separate Twitter account just to follow his top friends before someone reminded him he’s got this great new Twitter client he may be able to use for filtering. I still think that the functionality needs to be added on the Twitter platform and accessible through the API for that to be effective or else you will have 3rd party apps using their own external implementation schemes which won’t be as elegant a solution or transferable for that matter.
There have been several services released that are now attacking this issue for RSS readers & aggregators using interesting methods to identify and increase visibility of the “good” stuff. They’re using algorithms that take into account trackbacks, comments, Google reader share volume, and other data points to show items that are popular.
FriendFeed bubbles up stream items based on comments and likes. Great if all of your friends are on that service, but I would want to factor the data on the source services to act as indicators for items I should view. For instance Flickr could provide data for images on times viewed, favorited, commented on, and external referrers as methods to increase importance of a stream item.
I have other thoughts on this as well as methods to filter Twitter but I won’t go into detail for fear of lulling you to sleep. I’ll try to take the time to collect these thoughts better in a future post.
I recently featured Yongfook’s Lifestream in the first Self Hosted Lifestream Gallery. Several people commented on how they really liked his unique design. Well guess what, pretty soon you will be able to host your own version just like his with the release of his new development project Sweetcron. Visiting the site provides the following details:
Automatic Imports - Uploaded a photo to flickr? Bookmarked a new site? In a few minutes it will show up on your blog!
Easily Customisable - Edit simple templates to change the way your Sweetcron Lifestream looks. Default Boxy But Good theme included!
Self Hosted - Keep all your data safely on your own server and run Sweetcron via your own domain.
100% Free and Open Source - Oh and did I mention Sweetcron is fully extensible, too? Write your own php classes and slot them right in!
This all sounded great, but I still had some questions. So I decided to contact Yongfook to see if he could provide me with some details. Below are the results.
So it sounds like it’s going to be software for a self hosted solution right?
yep, think of it as running Plaxo Pulse or Tumblr on your own server. t continually imports stuff from other places (your flickr, diggs, Youtube favs etc) and also allows you to post directly. It’s what my blog uses.
What are the platform requirements (php, mysql, etc.)?
php5 and mysql5.
What services will be supported?
It’s extensible so that you can add whatever services you want.
Can you add services easily?
Yes, there is a simple GUI to add new services
Will stream data be cached locally? (i.e. create records in db for historical purposes)
Each item will be stored in the the database, allowing people to page through your lifestream and perform searches etc. There is also a GUI to manage and edit the data (i.e. take stuff offline that was imported but you don’t want to show in your lifestream)
How are new themes added / created?
I’m really not looking to replicate a traditional CMS with all this hot-swapping of “themes” etc. There are some simple controls to customise the layout of the site (e.g. grid-style like my site or “stream” style like FriendFeed) change colours and text, and ability to paste in your own CSS. Beyond that, you’ll have to edit the
template files directly.
Any plans to release plugins or modules to extend the functionality of existing platforms? (ie. Wordpress, Drupal)
Nope - people who want to use Wordpress should just use Wordpress! I’m sure there are lifestream plugins for that already.
Any other unique functionality that differentiates this from other Lifestreaming scripts or services out there?
It’s different from a service in that you can self-host and use it under your own domain. The benefit it has over other scripts? Ease of use and it certainly looks a lot nicer than the ones I’ve seen so far
So when can we get our hands on this code?
June
I want to thank Yongfook for taking the time to answer my questions. This is definitely software that you want to keep an eye out for and you can go to the Sweetcron site & sign up to be notified as soon as it becomes available.
May 12, 2008 
Posted in Tips, Service 
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