Yesterday I wrote about Swurl but today found a great new feature I hadn’t seen during my original testing of the service. I had added my Last.fm account but it hadn’t imported my “loved” tracks yet. Today when I revisited I was very surprised to find what it does when importing your tracks.
There are several cool features that supplement imported tracks. There is a play button that will stream the song, if you mouseover you will see the cover of the cd, there will be a download link for the track, and finally you are presented with lyrics for the track. Some of the features will not always work for tracks as they are apparently running track data through a variety of services to achieve this which aren’t always available.
FriendFeed has also recently added the ability to stream enclosures on the site in a flash player. Yesterday I started coming across some feed items from user edythe labeled “Last Loved MP3’s” that included the inline player. I was curious and wanted to know how she was doing this. It turns out she was using this yahoo pipe which converts the Last.fm recently loved tracks XML feed to a RSS feed including links to MP3’s from Seeqpod.
If you want to do the same:
Enter your Last.fm user id on the Yahoo Pipe page
click “Run Pipe”
Click on the RSS icon titled “More options”
Click on “Get as RSS”
Now copy the url in your browser to your buffer
Go to FriendFeed and click on the “Me” tab
Click on the “Edit/add” link under Services
Click on “Blog” under Blogging
Paste the url from your buffer and click on the “Import Blog” button
Now just go start loving tracks on Last.fm and watch as they start to appear in your feed. Keep in mind that this feed is just including links for tracks if they are available on Seeqpod and in many cases they won’t work properly. Nevertheless it’s a pretty cool little hack to share your loved songs on FriendFeed.
These are some really cool features that are taking the Lifestreaming experience to the next level by by offering immediate exposure for discovering new music your friends listen to. It’s great seeing new innovation in the space by leveraging additional services and functionality and I look forward to watching this logic applied in other areas.
I wrote about Lifestream.fm a while back. This new service came on the scene and very quickly got purchased. Well it’s now been 2 months since the acquisition and they have been working on a new version and it has just been released.
Here’s a list of new features:
Support for 56 services
Comments - You can now leave comments on items posted.
Filters - Filter services and followers
Search - Not just your stream, but all of Lifestream.fm for content and friends
Import your friends from your address book
See your last visitors displayed
Extended profiles with contact info
Delete posted items to your stream
A German version supporting new German services
If you want to try these new features out though, you better hope you already have an account as they have now gone into closed beta. If you’re interested in joining I’m pretty sure I can secure some invite codes that will be posted in the comments later.
Along with these new features they’ve launched an Adobe Air app for the service. I would report some info on this but unfortunately it did not work properly for me.
You can find my page here and you can read more about the new relaunch on their blog here.
I decided to try out Swurl today. They’re the latest newcomer to the Lifestreaming party.
Creating an account and getting started has to be one of the quickest, no-nonesense processes I have seen in a Lifestreaming service yet. Heck, they have the signup form right on the home page. You are then presented with a list of their supported services to add to your Lifestream. You can add the services quickly and I like the fact that in most cases they provide details regarding the content that will be imported from the services you add. Providing these details are a pet peeve of mine. FriendFeed does a poor job of doing this, while Iminta does by far the best of all services out there. I wrote a very detailed piece about it here.
They currently offer 19 services including Blockbuster which I don’t remember being offered anywhere else, not even Profilactic, well…at least for a few days until this post goes live. They also support FriendFeed friends, but not content. More on that later. Lastly they don’t offer the ability to import your own feeds.
After you’re done adding services you hit a button and boom, you’re taken to your Lifestream page. Right away I noticed that the page looked all to familiar. Being an avid Wordpress user I noticed that the design is identical to the default K2 theme. From the font used, navigation, and down to the same #3371A3 hex header color! I know totally unimportant and geeky but I thought it would be fun to share.
The Lifestream itself aims to provide a slightly stylistic approach to items similar to Tumblr to some degree. But unlike Tumblr, they offer built in commenting on items. I like the larger photo imports and video embeds. Another big plus is importing of my tags for Del.icio.us items. And even though all the tag does is link to my Del.icio.us page for said tag, I really wish Lifestreaming services supported tagging across all stream items.
Next up is the coolest feature and that’s the Friends functionality. Joining a Lifestreaming service with hopes of interacting with other users can be daunting if you don’t already have friends using it. You can feel a bit aprehensive to engage strangers. One of the coolest features of Swurl is that when you visit your friends page for the first time it’s already populated with content from all your friends that it auto-discovered and imported from the services you added. I believe that’s part of the purpose for adding your FriendFeed account. This is a much better, non-intrusive way that should be used by more services as opposed to asking for your email or any account password for that matter. They provide a list that links the usernames for each of your friends to their pages on the respective service. This page could benefit greatly from filters by user and/or service as well.
But the real kicker is that if any of your imported friends have a Swurl account as well, they automatically follow them for you and provide links to their pages as well. That’s pretty cool. I even noticd that as I revisited the page I found new friends had recently signed up to Swurl and were automatically added. Of note though is that you can’t comment on items from this view, even if the user has an account on Swurl. You will need to go to their profile page to be able to comment on the item.
I liked the unique Timeline view. This provides a calendar type view broken down daily by boxes that display items from your stream which includes thumbnails for photos & videos. It also populated boxes with cd covers for songs you liked on Last.fm. Although not a very practical approach for displaying information on a busy timeline, I appreciate the thought. I think a good, clean, functional calendar view would be a great feature addition to any Lifestreaming service and wish more of them would create them.
Lastly they offer an about page that provides details on the services that are used to creat the Lifestream along with an editable text box you can use to provide anything you want. They also offer the ability to provide a replacement header with any image you care to upload.
If you decide to check out Swurl, you can find me here.
Read more about Swurl:
Lifehacker - Swurl Aggregates Your Online Activity in a Calendar
TechCrunch - Swurl’s Lifecasting Generates Your Blog For You
Update:Apparently I’m blind and need to pay more attention as you will see after reading the first comment. In any case, I still think this tip is useful for people. This has now been downgraded from a hack to a tip.
So how often do you upload a photo to Flickr or bookmark something on Del.icio.us only to wait patiently for it to appear in your feed while continually refreshing your browser?
FriendFeed definitely seems to have varying timeframes when they poll services to add items to your feed. Twitter seems to often happen very quickly, while other services can take quite long. I don’t have details on their methods for polling services, but I do have a hack to speed up the process that I will share with you.
First off, upload a photo, bookmark a page, or add whatever content to a service you’ve added to FriendFeed
Go to FriendFeed and click on the “Me” tab to bring up your profile
Click on the “Edit/Add” link under your Services listing
Click on the service you added something to
When the service screen comes up click on the “save changes” button
Now when the page reloads your new item should appear
I came across an amusing post by Glenn Slaven (author of the great FriendFeed Comments Wordpress Plugin) where he had discovered that 2 FriendFeed users (Deepak & Kevin,) appeared in Google’s search results as more relevant than the about page. He mentions some other interesting ranks after clicking on the more results.
I decided to take Glenn’s lead and progress this to the next level by listing the top 30 FriendFeed users based on those results. Here you will find some of the usual suspects that always make these lists, but there are lots of new faces. Keep in mind that this is just a current snapshot, but it will be interesting to monitor over time.
Today I started thinking about how cool it would be if I could see the locations of my Twitter friends on a Map. After spending some time Googling for such a tool I was only able to find one, and interestingly enough it only became available a few days ago.
I came across this post by Andy Murdoch who has created a Yahoo Pipe that puts nice pushpin representations of all your Twitter users on a map of the world. It also allows you to scroll through them displaying their names and Bio’s. Also, since it’s a Yahoo Pipe you can embed it into your own site.
This is the first guest post from reader Terri Ann. I wrote about her custom Lifestream previously here. You can visit her blog at blog.ninedays.org and don’t forget to check out her lifestream. If you are interested in writing a guest post, just head on over to my contact page
The other day on css tricks.com, they posted about creating your own social home which appeared to me as more of a personal/social portal than a lifestream. A lifeportal, if you will.
Chris, over there, provided a great download to get you started building your own lifeportal using only jQuery and JSON to query the API’s for three popular web services: Flickr, Twitter and ScrnShots.
His article also walks you through everything those scripts are doing, giving you the tools to really customize the download to suit your own needs.
It’s those customization skills that are so critical with lifestreams and lifeportals since everyone uses their own set of social networking, social bookmarking and other social sharing services.
The way I see it, the main difference between lifeportals and most lifestreams is that this idea or a portal page is based more on the service and the latest information from that service than the date. How else can I put it? Like a page of feeds about the now, more than the overall time line and progression.
One great lifeportal really brings that idea of the now together. Jared Zimmerman has really simplified the idea and uses Flickr, Amazon, Yahoo!, Facebook, 43Things as well as other APIs to show more about his life, right now.
I’ve stumbled across a few other lifeportals that really show the strengths in this idea of separation of feeds rather than the integration into a time line.
Katy in Las Vegas - A very similar organization as Jon’s but uses Twitter, a blogging RSS feed, StumbleUpon and then shows her social network profiles and contact form in a similar manner, really keeping the flow of the page very consistent. Oh, and it’s a super cute look (is the girl in me showing again?)
Which do you prefer to use for yourself or see on another person’s site?
Where do you think this trend is going? Do you think people are going to focus more on the now or the time line idea?
I was contacted by Gina Pace of the New York Press for a story they were writing on Lifestreaming. I spent about 40 minutes with her on the phone where I spent a good deal of time explaining the concept from its early beginnings to where it is now and where I thought it was going. It was a great conversation.
It would have been nice if she mentioned this site and other topics we had discussed, but overall it resulted in a good article which you can read here
I read today over at Startup Dunia, a blog covering Indian startups, about two new Lifestreaming services. I only have some brief information gathered from each of them as both services are currently invite only.
The first is called LifeinLines which appears to be more of an online diary based service.
From the site:
LiL has integrated multiple technologies to make it very simple for you to capture your thoughts anytime, anywhere, using any media. You can write on the LiL website or send LiL an email, a message from your Gtalk or an SMS/MMS. If words and images fall short of what you want to say, you can even make a phone call and record your voice.
After touring the site I didn’t see the ability to import from other services, but one can only imaging they would be adding this as an option soon. There were definitely some interesting features with regards to creating friend groups, ratings and the multitude of posting methods. If you find this site interesting you should take a look at Dandelife which I feel offers a more mature and richer feature set.
The second service is called LifeBlob and offers the visual timeline metaphor which seems to be a UI method that is growing in popularity.
From the site:
What differentiates Lifeblob is that your timeline has a social angle to it. When you make a post on your timeline, you can include a list of people who are related to the post or who were participants if the post is about a real event. And instantly, the post not only becomes a part of your timeline, but also shows up on the timelines of all these participants, thereby establishing a relationship ( a.k.a bridge ) between all these timelines.
At first glance it looks fairly similar to Dipity which I’ve written about. The timeline interface itself isn’t quite as robust as Dipity’s with regards to fluidity and zoom factors. Also, I was only able to view profiles that had imported images from Picasa and blog posts. I liked how they grouped the images in the timeline along with the expansions. Each timeline also offered tags for keywords and locations which if clicked on, offered a filtered timeline view. These filters are also available from the home page.
You can visit the original story about these services from the Startup Dunia site here.
I got an email from Terri Ann yesterday telling me about how she had stumbled onto a Lifestream on a site she had visited and felt compelled to create her own. Well her effort is very impressive with some unique visual presentations worth checking out.
Her footer shows the different sources that make up her “Life Feed” with a section titled “built and rebuilt feeds”. She is using Yahoo Pipes and leveraging screen shots from Web Snapr as well.
She states that a write-up and tutorial for how she created it will be available in the future. We look forward to it!
July 3, 2008 Written by:
Mark Krynsky 
Posted in Tips, Service 
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I liked the unique Timeline view. This provides a calendar type view broken down daily by boxes that display items from your stream which includes thumbnails for photos & videos. It also populated boxes with cd covers for songs you liked on Last.fm. Although not a very practical approach for displaying information on a busy timeline, I appreciate the thought. I think a good, clean, functional calendar view would be a great feature addition to any Lifestreaming service and wish more of them would create them.
I was contacted by Gina Pace of the New York Press for a story they were writing on Lifestreaming. I spent about 40 minutes with her on the phone where I spent a good deal of time explaining the concept from its early beginnings to where it is now and where I thought it was going. It was a great conversation.
The first is called 
The second service is called 
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