I came across not just one but two new Lifestreaming services the other day which I think continues the trend that I predicted would make Lifestreaming reach a tipping point in 2007. But I won’t dwell on my Nostradamus like abilities with regards to web predictions…on to the services.

Natuba is currently an invite only service that I was lucky enough to quickly get access to. The first thing I noticed when setting up my account is how elegant the interface was. I quickly added a few feeds and took a look at my page and it immediately reminded me of an older player in this space called Suprglu. The two aim to make your Lifestream page aesthetically pleasing with the ability to choose from pre-made templates and added ability to generate custom CSS for your page.

A handful of pre-determined common services are supported including Youtube, Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, and most of the blogging platforms available. You can also add your own RSS feeds as well. Once your page has been created there is a floating customization palette that you can use to edit the attributes of each individual item on your page. This service was definitely created with the designer in mind and it shows.

Although the homepage displays a cool live scrolling ticker of feed items as they are added, the site is geared more towards using it to provide an external URL to share your Lifestream with as opposed to having more social features with the ability to browse other users pages, add friends etc. This will be an interesting one to watch as it progresses to a full release.

I have several invites for you loyal Lifestream Blog readers so if you are interested you need to be a member of #Lifestream at Jaiku Channels and simply ask for one in the comments of this post.

Here’s my Natuba Lifestream

afeeda takes a very different approach in that it provides for various ways to aggregate feeds in a social manner by wrapping them into categories. They promote 3 specific categories which are Personal Feeds which is what you would use to create a Lifestream, Group Feeds to aggregate feeds around a certain topic, and Event Feeds to generate content around a specific conference or event. These 3 categories are just filtered labels which act as forced placeholders as the functionality for each of them is identical. They are just basically showing some top methods for using the functionality which is a good thing. Sometimes you have to spoon-feed technology to certain groups. You can also create as many aggregated feeds as you want for each of the categories.

One of the coolest things I found when setting up my account was the ability to import feeds from an OPML file…Yaaaay! Since I test and review so many services I happen to have one of these handy but as of yet had not been able to utilize it for any of the existing services but this was my lucky day. Definitely a feature for the geek crowd but I welcome it as my Lifestream continues to grow and it becomes time consuming to add all of my feeds to new and existing services. So in went my OPML file and out came all my feeds without any errors….(in my best Borat voice) Very Nice!

As you add feeds you can assign them labels which can then be used later to filter the output of the aggregated feed. They also offer a Bookmarklet to allow for adding sources to your feeds as you surf the web. One drawback is that it doesn’t archive the feed items. It just provides a real-time polled view as well as an aggregated feed which you can then add to your own feed reader. It also provides an OPML file export of the feeds used that make up the Lifestream. Another nice touch.

Overall I like some of the unique features provided here and the clean interface and speedy server responsiveness. The service is definitely worth a look.

Here’s my afeeda Lifestream

Read over in a blog post by Tyme from 9rules about a new Lifestream section being added to my.9rules

Here’s a snip:

Scrivs previewed The Stream for my.9rules the other day. What is not showing on my example is under lifestream, several services will be brought together to make it easier for the reader/viewer to follow everything that is being said by the individual.

Just another sign of Lifetreaming entering the mainstream.

P.s. you can find my 9rules page here

Thomas Hawk is CEO of Zooomr.com and I came across his post which was in response to Dave Winer’s post New idea: Social Cameras. Thomas’ post is a very interesting read and I think touches on some very cool technologies and concepts that could be coming in the near future in digital photography. I’ve always been a geek with regards to the EXIF data in my digital pictures and it would be so cool to have a camera with GPS that could store Lat / Long in that area. I also think that photo sharing sites that leverage this and any additional meta data cameras begin to store in the future will provide for some great features. Flickr has a Cameras page that already uses EXIF data.

Here’s a snip from Thomas’ post:

The technology to do this is pretty close. The first step with this technology will be event driven. Event photos is a huge area of interest. But there is no reason that the same technology cannot also be used to create a sort of personal lifestream that allows you to track the photos being taken around you on a time space continuium. A timeline of your photos, with the photos closest to yours on the timeline also being presented.

I’m calling out any readers that are (or know) designers to come up with a logo for this site. I’m not a good artist and I’m open to suggestions. The Lifestream concept should provide a good inspiration for creating something cool. I would also like to use it as a favicon as well so something that would look good that small would be nice. I don’t have a price but would be very grateful and would thank you by posting a link to your site on my homepage which ain’t bad for a site with a Google Pagerank of 6 eh?

Above logo courtesy of Flickr User Ramp Creative from his Bad Logo Collection
If you are interested please contact me on the about page.

With the new release of Channels on Jaiku I decided to create a Lifestream channel to see if maybe we can create a community based dialog on there since the forums I’ve setup here have failed miserably. If you already have a Jaiku account you can get to the #Lifestream Channel Here. If you don’t have an account…sign up, it’s a great service. I hope to see you there!