I’ve primarily spent time covering the tools and services to create Lifestreams on this site. What I haven’t spent much time on, and don’t see many others doing, is finding some more innovative and interesting sources of data for us to add to a Lifestream. A Lifestream is only as good and interesting as the content we provide in them. I want to start providing more info in this area, so today I thought I’d start by choosing one of my favorite sources to add personal product information to my Lifestream.
ProductWiki.com is pretty much what you’d gather from the name. Their vision is to be “the most comprehensive product information resource supported by a passionate community”. They’ve provided a fantastic site with very rich product pages that allow users to contribute products and all types of associated content including reviews, ratings, deals, and comments. The site is very innovative and worthy of exploration regardless of it’s ability to be used as a Lifestreaming source.
I’m an avid tech and gadget follower so I use the site to research and contribute product information. But as it relates to Lifestreaming, I provide a feed of the products I own. So as I add new products I own to my profile at ProductWiki, they are automatically added to my Lifestream.
So now I’ll provide a guide on how you can do this as well:
- You’ll need to go create an account at ProductWiki. You can even use OpenID
- Navigate the site to find some products you own
- When you’re on a product page for an item you own, click on the “have it” button
- Once you’ve added all of your products, go to your profile page
- Now click on the “Lists” tab
- On the lower right you will see a section called “My Stuff”. Now click on the “have it” text
- You now have filtered this list to show items you own. You will see the familiar RSS icon near the middle top of the page that provides a feed which can now be used as a source for your Lifestream
Here are some screenshots I made to make it even easier:
Even cooler is the fact that you can use multiple tags along with “have it” to apply to products within your profile. They also have “want it” (could create a source of just items your planning to buy) and “love it” as default tags that you can use as well. You can also create your own tags for products as well. So let’s say you wanted to create a list for a specific product category of items you own such as “dvd” you can do that as well. The site is extremely flexible in those regards.
They also provide a widget you can use on your site for any of these filtered lists as well. Below is a widget of the products I own:
Are there any unique sources that you are using in your Lifestream?
Please post them in the comments below.
I was contacted a few days ago by Dirk Olbertz to let me know about his Noserub Protocol and their first sample application written using it called Identoo which is a Lifestreaming service.
You can download the Identoo sample application written in PHP & MySQL from their site.
It appears that the timing of Noserub, which by their own words are trying to be “an inspiration, protocol, and implementation of a decentralized social network” is interesting to say the least with Google’s announcement of OpenSocial. It’s still a welcome addition in my mind since having many players work together will be key in building an open framework for Lifestreaming moving forward.
I created an account on Identoo and liked it’s very clean minimalistic approach of just tracking the data. I also like the tabbed menu approach of filtering content types. While you can add other contacts from the service it doesn’t provide a “friendstream” page to filter just their activities. There is however a public “social stream” page that tracks all updates in real-time.
Once again, they provide the source code so that anyone who aspires to look at how a Lifestream application is implemented, or may want a jumpstart their own development efforts, can take the app for a spin.
John McCrea over at Plaxo has a blog post today describing the use of an app written to the new OpenSocial API delivered from his Plaxo Lifestream widget.
Here’s a blurb:
I just added the first OpenSocial app to my Dynamic Profile in Pulse. But you don’t need to join Plaxo to see it. Why? Because Pulse is a truly open social network. The users own their own personal info and content, control who can see it, and have the freedom to take it with them wherever they want. So here’s my personal lifestreaming widget:
You can see the widget and read the rest of his post here
Lifestream Blog Logo by