The changes went live just a little while ago. I don’t have too much to say right now except I really like the new profile page layout with the Lifestream functionality front and center. Congrats to the whole MyBlogLog team as this has been a long time coming. You can read more on their blog post.

Here’s my new profile page
click for largeness

When I first created the Lifestreaming Services Comparison Matrix the small number of services fit quite nicely into a pretty css table. Since then I’ve wanted to add more services and tweak the feature set which proved to be a bit much to fit on a web page. So I’ve migrated the comparison matrix to a spreadsheet and using Scribd to host it (embedded below). It’s not very pretty, but it is functional. Please provide any feedback on additional features or corrections if I’ve missed something. I also plan on updating this frequently by adding more services and features as warranted.

I’ve steered pretty clear of giving recommendations for services on this site as the Lifestreaming space isn’t a “one shoe fits all” type of model that’s easily defined. But after finishing this I decdied to create a simple ranking system based purely by the number of features each site offered. Of course this isn’t a conclusive method of doing this since some features may be more important to some users than others. Still it was fun to have a basis to create a ranking of some sort. I highly recommend looking at the features to help you judge which are most important to help find the right service.

On to the Ranking!
2/29 Update: I added a missed feature on Profilactic and moved it to 3rd place

1. FriendFeed
2. Iminta
3. Profilactic & Plaxo Pulse
4. Jaiku
5. Dandelife
6. iStalkr
7. Correlate.us
8. Tumblr & Identoo

Lifestream Web Services Comparison

I’m currently working on an updated version of the Lifestream service comparison matrix and should have it ready very soon. Having worked on it for a while, it’s easy to see a pattern of feature sets that most services are supporting with some nice unique items available from several services. But in the end the differences are for the most part, just variations on methods of displaying, editing, and interfacing with the data.

Early on I knew creating a Lifestream was a great way to let my friends know what my current interests were and what I was paying attention to, but knew that it would evolve. And I’m not talking about ways that companies could monetize it, I meant the evolution that would take place when some innovative ideas would surface on ways to do something with all of this data.

FriendFeed appears to be the first service that has started working on the evolution of Lifestreaming or should I say Lifestream 2.0 (I tried hard not to say that but couldn’t hold myself back). They have recently addded some features that go beyond the common smorgasbord found at most services.

They have begun to show several stats. The first shows a breakdown of all the feed items posted by your friends. What they do is tally up all the feed updates for each service and provide a pie chart breaking them down. They also in turn provide the same chart specific to your updates as well. On FriendFeed you also have the ability to comment on feed items as well as marking an item as a favorite (flag as “Like”). Based on this data they provide a user bar graph ranking the interest of other members in your feed items which is calculated by their comments and “Likes”. Conversely they provide the same user graph based on your activity of commenting and liking other users feed items.

Sample Graph Below

Photo courtesy of Flickr user ducks127

The second feature is a simple recommendation engine. Now on your settings menu, there is a tab which provides a list of other members that you might be interested in following. The text on the heading of the page states “The people below are popular among your friends, and you might find their feeds interesting”. So I’m guessing that they’re looking at the frequency of these users being followed by your friends that you have one degree of separation from.

Below are my current recommendations

These 2 new features are nothing ground-breaking, but they are a glimpse of what’s coming in the Lifestreaming space. I’m happy to see that FriendFeed is doing some forward thinking here and can’t wait to see what other cool features they and others have in store for us in the months to come.

You can keep up on FriendFeed’s progress by following them on their blog

I just came across this post at the Social Media Explorer where Jason Falls puts his spin on the new Lifestreaming functionality coming to MyBlogLog very soon. I wrote about this as well recently. It appears that Jason struck a nerve when he stated “Is Yahoo just ripping off established aggregators like Profilactic?”. It just so happened that Eric Marcoullier (one of the Co-Founders of MyBlogLog who is no longer there) made his way to the site and left 2 comments providing us with some history behind the “New With Me” functionality which is soon to be released.

Quote from Eric:

We hade the first version of New With Me circulating in private beta in late April of 2007. We were not allowed to launch because it was apparently in conflict with another project in development elsewhere in the organization that was due to launch a year later. One of many reasons I left.

This is interesting on two levels. The first being that Eric saw Lifestreaming as being an innovative new concept and could have positioned MyBlogLog as a frontrunner in the service game. Secondly, what could have been the Yahoo project in development that was holding this back, and is it still coming or has it been scrapped? Very interesting things to ponder.

I do feel for Eric as the ordeal must have made matters incredibly frustrating for him after Yahoo’s purchase, and you can feel it from his comments. It’s situations like this that can really take the wind out of your sails. I wonder if matters were made worse if after leaving he had to sign a non-compete clause not allowing him to work on a Lifestreaming venture of his own. That’s assuming he even wanted to at that point. I can only speculate.

Shortly after Eric’s comment we see another one posted by Todd Sampson who was also a Co-Founder of MyBlogLog and still with the company.

Quote from Todd:

In the end, every site is going to have a user’s life-stream available as a tool to help make the user’s experience better. What a site ultimately does with the life-stream is what will matter.

That is oh so true and he hit the nail with that one. We have seen so many services that are now able to aggregate the data, slice it, dice it and so forth. The next step in the evolution of Lifestreaming will be to see some killer algorithms written do something meaningful with all this data that’s being provided.

Todd also has a post titled “Distributed Social Networks have Tipped“. I agree in that the launch of all the recent efforts to free our data including those by OpenSocial, Data Portability, DiSo, and Google’s Social Graph, we’re hopefully gonna see more innovation soon.

I’m just glad that MyBlogLog is finally moving forward with something they’ve had baking for over a year. Funny thing is it’s usually the other way around with ambitious development efforts taking too long to market and angering the biz folk. Here you had some innovative code being forced to stay on the development server and not getting to see the light of day for almost a year. An ugly form of irony if you’re in the dotcom field.

I’ve been chatting it up a bit lately with Matt Galligan who is one of the founders of Socialthing! which is a new Lifestreaming service that is currently in private beta. One of their distinguishing features is the ability to use the service as a dashboard to publish to other services. I’ll provide more details about them in an upcoming post, but today Matt sent me a sweet photo showing off their service running on an iPhone.

Photo courtesy of Matt Galligan

That is one sexy looking iPhone app if I may say so myself. You can keep up with the progress of Socialthing on their blog