Today I came across a post on Read/WriteWeb called 10 More Future Web Trends. It appears that the story is a follow up to a post where they had picked 10 future trends and created this new list based on the feedback from users stating that their list wasn’t quite ambitious enough.

Coming in at #5 was User-controlled, open Internet Identity

Thomas Huhn pointed out that “forming your online identity, controlling what personal data you give to whom and aggregating all your and your environments lifestreams in an open social network is simply essential for the further development of the web.” We’re seeing this develop now (it’s sometimes referred to as, you guessed it, Identity 2.0), but the scenario Thomas described is 5+ years into the future.

Thomas Huhn appears to be one of the people behind a new Lifestreaming site called yowhassup.com. His appearance on the list was based this post from his blog.

In that post he states the following:

YoWhassup goes a natural and simple way to put you in control: Every contact, every information that comes in from one of your lifestreams and every information you generate yourself is asked to be shared with one of your networks: with one simple click you decide if you keep a contact secret, public, or share it with e.g. your professional network.

It’s nice to see Lifestreaming continue to make it’s way into the mainstream and is definitely poised to become the foundation for many new services in the near future. Not the least of which will be to take these detailed profiles of our lives and find ways to enrich it based on all the data.

Now i’m off to try and get an invite to Yowhassup…stay tuned.

In my previous post I mentioned how I’ve been out of touch with the goings on in the Lifestreaming arena due to the obligations of my day job. I started going through the feeds I have setup to scour for some new sites that had been released. It didn’t take long as I came across a post on mashable about a new site called Intuuch that had Lifestreaming written all over it. Reading about it piqued my interest quite a bit and I decided to go check it out…and just like that I was back in the Lifestreaming saddle again.

The first thing I noticed when visiting the site is that they clearly took their design cue from Twitter with regards to the UI. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, quite the contrary, it will make people feel very comfortable with the familiar look and feel of the site if they’re already a twitter user. It was time to enter the oh so critical, make or break portion of any Lifestreaming site, as I registered and went to create my account profile. The account creation work flow is an interesting one as the registration page also prompts you to enter all of the network profiles you want to add to the service. For the Lifestreaming neophyte (and the privacy fearing crowd) this may be a bit scary without a clear description of the site’s purpose and what they plan to do with this information. As with many of the newer sites as of late, services are added by providing your user / account name on the service. This continues to be a welcome departure from the earlier days (yea I said it…some of us are veterans now:) where sites had you provide the RSS feed for the service you wanted to add. I’m also guessing that this allows the site to use either the feed, or API where available, to pull in data and as networking sites provide API’s moving forward they can make the graceful switch on the backend.

Most of the usual suspects are supported including Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, last.fm etc…but the ability to add an RSS feed for a site not supported is lacking*. Why the asterisk you ask? Well that’s because they do support your Feedburner account. So you can get around this limitation by burning a feed for a site that isn’t supported into your Feedburner account which will then show up in your profile. My guess is that they have determined that maintaing feeds using Feedburner allows them to be manageble without having to deal with the unknowns of allowing any RSS feed to be added willy nilly which I’ve seen cause issues at other sites.

After account creation there are several other settings you can edit. Most of them are pretty common with the exception of allowing you some design changes to your profile page with regards to color choices. Once complete your profile page will then display your Lifestream based on the services added. As I’m writing this I still only see a handful of the profiles I’ve added appearing on my page. Only 6 items from 5 of the 10 services I added. I’ll have to monitor this as the adage “less is more” is not what I’m looking for when I create a Lifestream. I can only hope that they’ve setup a polling schedule to pull data later, but this could be a make or break feature if I don’t see more data soon.

Friendstreaming (the ability to follow your friends Lifestreams) is one of the more compelling reasons to use this site. Once again ala Twitter they provide a “Public” page which shows all the stream data in real-time being added by users of their site. You can then either add existing users or invite your friends to join and offer up their streams using the “Friends” tab to make it easy to follow each other. I know, it’s a pain to bug your friends to join and setup there streams blah blah blah. Well perhaps that’s the case, and perhaps most of your friends are also using Facebook. If that’s the case, you’re in luck because they also offer a Facebook application to make that process less painful. I actually went ahead and added it as an app to my Facebook account. I can safely say that it has been the cleanest and most graceful implementation of an external site I have seen yet ported over to Facebook.

Lastly they offer a nice selection of widgets you can use that include Image, CSS/script, and iFrame flavors for you to choose from. It’s been quite a while since I’ve reviewed a new site and it was a pleasure to have come back after so long and found Intuuch. This site is very promising. I really hope the issue with the lack of data being pulled from my services (and this isn’t a minor issue) is corrected. The clean and simple interface, friendstreaming functionality, and ultra impressive Facebook integration make this a very solid product that I highly recommend trying.

Here’s my page

Here’s my widget:

Dear Readers,

I just wanted to apologize for the lack of activity on this site over the last month. My day job had consumed me as of late. I was working crazy hours to migrate the website for the X PRIZE Foundation to run on Drupal along with moving to a new Data Center at the same time. I also managed the development of the Google Lunar X PRIZE site (on Drupal as well). I had no time for anything except eating and sleeping. Hopefully things should start getting back to normal.

Lifestream Posts & Pages for September 19th 2007:

• Lifestreams Channel Online Activity, Creating Rivers of Relevance – Some general commentary on Lifestreaming that also appears to have been spurred by Steve Rubel’s Lifestream
• No time to blog? Why you should start your own lifestream… – Using Lifestreams as a method to Micro-blog when you don’t have time for normal blog posts
• Get Engagd: Creating an APML file from your Lifestream – Chris Saad offers us an easy way to create an APML file from our Lifestreams
• Who needs Carnivore when you have lifestreams – Commentary on Lifestreams and fear of losing privacy
• 20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking Profiles – Here’s a roundup with brief descriptions of many services that can be used to Lifestream.
• Tech News Speak: Prematurely Squirted is the New Word for leaked – Post on how Jaiku officially leaked their new symbian software. Gotta love the headline