Lifestream Posts & Pages for July 31st 2007

• Library clips :: Friendstreams :: July :: 2007 – Great post by John covering what a Friendstream is and the various services that allow you to create them
• django-lifestream | zerokspot.com – Here’s a post where someone created a Lifesream for django inspired by Jeff Croft and Manuella Hoffman
• Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » Privacy in a world of lifestreaming – Another Lifestreaming and Privacy post
• cearta.ie » Blog Archive » You don’t know what you’ve lost till it’s gone? Privacy in a world gone Web2.0 – Interesting post on privacy that mentions Lifestreaming and this blog
• Get Engagd: Announcing Engagd.com – The first open, standards based Attention Platform – APML for the masses available now
• /Message: Flow and Streams – Here’s a post making the observation that lifestreams are starting to become mainstream

On the heels of my previous post I got an email from reader Adam Stiskala about his current Lifestream development effort using SimplePie.

He goes on to ask:

I was wondering whether you would have ideas on how I could get some feedback form the community on what they would like to see included and where I can take it from where it currently is.

I’m interested and hopefully other users here are as well so I’ll start.

First off can you tell us a little bit about the code? Is it a wordpress or other platform plugin or just some custom php scripting? Are you building an admin screen to determine the headers and feeds that are filtered within them? (ie. “generated content” has “blog” and “flickr”). I don’t think admin is necessary if you have good commented code with a section to add the headers and desired feeds for them. Same goes for ability to define icon for feeds.

I’ll open the forum for Adam to tell us a little more about this as I think it could be useful for those of us that would like to host (or at least supplement) a Lifestream on our own sites. I also encourage others to leave comments for him as well.

First off I’ll say that I’m glad to see Lifestreaming continue growing awareness across the web. Unfortunately, due partly to the openness of the concept and plethora of services and methods to create them, confusion is rampant. That appears to be the case after this recent post on Mashable titled “20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking Profiles”. It was a month ago that I went off on a rant about another Mashable article that in my opinion put a negative spin on Lifestreaming.

In this post, author Stan Shroeder attempts to compile a huge list of services with short single paragraph descriptions in which I gleefully watch him use the Lifestream term 8 times (yes I counted them). I knew before finishing the piece that there would be an abundance of comments listing services that he had missed as this is becoming a very crowded space.

Although confusing, I hope the story at least piqued readers curiosity to begin exploring these services and learn more about Lifestreaming. Many of the services out there start with the same functional foundation of providing external service aggregation, but most branch off into many different directions from there. The article made me realize that I need to be spending more time working on my comparison matrix as well as starting to try and classify services into some categorized groupings to help steer people in some direction as well.

I recently began the process of migrating my self hosted Lifestream to be powered by SimplePie and its Wordpress Plugin. I first became aware of this method on Amos Moses Griffin’s Lifestream page.

Coincidentally enough I got an email from Manuella last week who had just created her Lifestream using Simplepie and some custom CSS. She also wrote a tutorial on her process to create it which currently is only in German. She told me she may update it in English, but for now I decided to run it through Babelfish for those of us that don’t sprecken the Deutch.

User Tommaso on #Lifestream let me know about an interesting project called Socialstream. It was the result of a Google-sponsored capstone project in the Master’s program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. It was initially planned as a way to improve Orkut which is Google’s home grown social network but it went beyond just simple funtionality changes and UI improvements.

Here’s a snip of the Lifestream task they were trying to accomplish:

Aggregated Social Content – Presenting all of a person’s social content in a single site makes it easier for users to keep up-to-date with their contacts by making the process of finding information takes less effort and time. With Socialstream, users no longer have to jump from site to site just to see if or what their contacts have been up to, since all information is easily accessible from a single location.

After reading through the project pages this looks to be a very well thought out and impressive looking service. It appears to really be striving to not only allow users to create Lifestreams, but adds functionality to create a social network based on them for all users within to share their presence with each other. Im really looking forward to this one and hope that it becomes available to us at some point soon.

This project illuminated my realization that one thing I’m starting to notice. As we get flooded with more Lifestreaming services there is a need for one of them to gain dominance if a social network is to be built around them. For many of us, not only do we want a full featured Lifestream with all our aggregated services, but we want all our friends’ Lifestreams to be just as easily accessible on that same service. The same issues that prompted the Lifestream concept to be created in the first place, will repeat if such a service doesn’t emerge.

A similar situation is starting to happen with the battle for micro-blogging services. Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce are now in a duel to see who will become king. Having a winner is pretty important as following your friends and posting to all 3 services is cumbersome. Although similar, for me, the use of any one of these is just a service component that make up my Lifestream definition. If you follow my Lifestream, it doesn’t matter which one of them I use and vice versa if I monitor your Lifestream. For now, I primarily use Twitter and feed that content into Jaiku. That’s the beauty of Lifestreams, you can choose any services within specific areas to make one up.