Today I was reading this month’s Wired magazine when I came across this article called Desktop R.I.P. The article discusses the migration of our application use from the offline (desktop) world to that of rich online applications. I like the term they dubbed calling it cloudware. Near the end of the article I read the following which speaks directly to benefits gained by Lifestreaming.

“What if online services could see the trail of bread crumbs people leave behind them on the Net? Privacy concerns aren’t likely to trump the ample benefits. With a rich archive of personal data, online services could respond to individual preferences and habits.”

Ever since I’ve become aware of the Lifestream concept I’ve been monitoring any new tidbits of information that may be released. So I came across a link to an article titled “Lifestreams could help create new personalised discovery engines” which sounded very interesting so a clicking I will go. Once there I started to read this article that was very interesting when as I started to scroll down the screen I saw the familiar MyBlogLog recent readers widget on the sidebar. So I see my mug on there and then right below me was what I would consider to be an internet Icon. It was none other than Mr. Dave Winer himself. Father of RSS among many other accolades and today was named one of the “The 50 Most Important People on the Web“. Clocking in a bit lower than I would have put him at #39 but hey…they had Tila Tequila listed at #50 so their credibility sank like a tank after I saw that.

I continued to finish the article and then was prompted to add a pretty lengthy comment as well. I then decdied to click on Dave’s avatar to take a look at what his profile looked like. I was then pretty surprised to see that he had just signed up with MyBlogLog that day. Talk about strange timing I was looking at a bare profile page and having just read the latest post on a blog about Lifestreams I felt compelled to drop a message on his page to both re-inforce the chance he was there to read it or draw attention if he hadn’t.

All in all my impulse to do this seemed pretty strange. It really felt like the equivalent of a celebrity spotting, followed by some casual stalking, only to end up with a possibly unprovoked heckle. Pretty amazing similar situations to reality that can occur on the web these days which I would have never pursued in real life, but on the Internet, I almost felt compelled to. Basically I was pretty excited at the strange string of coincidences and let them get the best of me. I just hope that Dave does have interest in some of the concepts regarding Lifestreams and that he becomes involved in helping define a standard.

I have met quite a few new friends after writing my post on Lifestreaming and one of them was Olivier D. alias ze kat. I became intrigued with how he went about creating his Lifestream. So we started a dialog on IM about a new project he is working on which is to build a platform to allow people to create their own Lifestreams. I think this is a great idea since nobody has built a dedicated platform as of yet. Sure there is Tumblr, Suprglu, and Pageflakes. All of these sites can be used to create one, but none are really suited specifically for Lifestreaming.

So Olivier offered to create a Life-Line (Lifelog is his preferred term) page for me. I need to find out why he omitted a few of my feeds (Last.fm, Digg, Librarything), nonetheless, I was very excited to become a guinea pig for him. All he asked for was a small bio, my OPML file, a profile image, and to offer feedback. I was excited when I woke up today to find an IM from him with the url for my stream. So now that he has created my page it’s time for me to cough up my end of the bargain.

The first thing you notice is a very clean interface. The header provides the profile image, bio, and an RSS feed for the stream. Right below that is a tag cloud which is a nice touch. Missing on my page, but available on his stream, is a strip of avatars displaying recent readers from MyBlogLog. Now it gets interesting as he has provided a tabbed menu to filter the stream by type of subject matter. This is a great feature that allows followers to quickly jump to specific sections which I had mentioned would be a great feature that is lacking on other streams. Each tab also lists the number of items available. You can also choose whether you want to display summaries for each item. The last tab “About” provides details of all the feeds that make up the Lifestream.

Below the tabs is a small calendar that shows the current and previous month broken down by day on one line with an icon showing number of items available for that day above it. By mousing over the icon with number of items you get a popup block with a summary of the items for that day. Clicking on the icon will filter results for just that day. There are also filters for day, month, and year below the calendar. You then have the ability to allow for items you click on the either open up in a new window or tab within your browser. I couldn’t get either tab or window to work in Firefox and was only able to get it to open new windows in IE7 (finally some feedback).

Below the calendar the stream is displayed based on the tabbed filter selected. When viewing “All” each item is prefixed by the type of subject matter (tab) followed by the title and an icon allowing you to mark the item as read. If you are viewing with summaries and mark an item, it then collapses to just the headline and displays with a lighter font. A problem with this is that if you view without summaries (or clicking on an item marked as read) it requires 2 clicks to open the content. If items are displaying with titles only a mouseover provides full details and thumbnail image if available.

Overall I think most of the functionality is great. I think where it lacks a bit is in design. I would like to see some color coding done in the stream headlines either by stream type or individual feed. I also like the ability to prefix each item by a mini icon identifying the feed. I’m usually more of a minimalist but for some reason I enjoy these as quick identifiers in streams. Displaying the icons would also make for a nice legend in the “About” tab. The tag cloud is nice, but it doesn’t link the tags. A search box would be helpful as well.

All of the feedback I have given is specific to the user profile. Where I think things can get interesting is functionality that bridges users based on the content within their streams. I would not like to see this type of site mirror functionality of most social networking sites. I would rather like to see dynamic functionality generated by logic on the server based on the content of each user’s stream.

I look forward to following Olivier as he continues to work on his site Life2front over the next few months.

Olivier D. alias Ze Kat – LifeLine
Mark Krynsky – LifeLine

Web Worker Daily has written a post where they describe the Lifestreaming concept specifically for providing updates in regards to work for co-workers and such to track what you’ve been working on.

“Workstreaming is the next generation of the 11 pm email you send to your team to show them that you’ve been working all evening.”

Seems like a decent vertical approach to the concept if the tools you use for work could provide such information. I can see where MS Office Apps could provide an RSS feed for snapshots of the progress of documents you are working on.

I came across this interestingly scrolling animated Lifestream the other day. I don’t think it’s a very functional one but pretty artsy and worth a look. The site is in Japanese so I can’t gather any other information on it.