There are many Lifestreaming sites that offer widgets & badges to place on your website but often they are limiting. So often many folks will choose a Lifestreaming service to use but opt for their own plugin or script to host a Lifestream on their own site. Still this method can be a bit painful as most plugins require a bit more work to get setup and often don’t offer support for the variety of sites that you may want to use.

For those of you in this quandry the proverbial killing two birds with one stone has been delivered with the new WP-Profilactic Wordpress plugin written by Anish H. Patel. It makes it very easy to host your own rich Lifestream on your own site. All you have to do is create an account and build your Lifestream on Profilactic where you can add from their unmatched support for up to 175 sites to your Lifestream.

After you’re done with the account creation you just download & install the plugin, provide your Profilactic account credentials, and then add a small snippet of code to a new template file or use the one provided. Yes, it’s that easy, no muss, no fuss. You also have the option of customizing the plugin with some options regardin number of posts to display, colors, etc.

You can check out a rich example of the plugin in action with 28 services on author Anish Patel’s site here. Also, be sure to check out my Profilactic page here.  And if you want to keep up to date on Profilactic and their never ending service additions you can follow user Profilactic on Twitter.

Embedding of Flickr notes provided by Mbedr

The artwork above was created by Paul Downey aka Flickr user psd. He also wrote a post on his inspiration for the piece here where he discusses his views on each of the technologies portrayed in the picture.

After reading it I also came across his unique self-hosted Lifestream here which is powered by the Planet Venus feed reader. His Lifestream offers exporting of OPML, FOAF, and an aggregated RSS feed.

If you’ve read this blog for a while you’ll also remember that back in January I too felt this was the year that Lifestreaming would really take off.

Dipity is a new service that has come out that allows you to create both the prettiest and visually functional timeline I have yet to see on the web. The timeline can be created to represent any historic information. They currently have over 20,000 timelines that cover a broad range of themes. Timelines are created either by entering items manually, or by adding a feed. That’s where the Lifestreaming aspect of building a timeline comes into play. They currently support the ability to import from Picasa, Twitter, Pandora, Wordpress.com, Last.fm, Flickr, Yelp, Blogger, Youtube, and any other supplied RSS Feed.

After you’ve given Dipity your data it quickly generates the visual timeline for you. The timeline allows multiple zoom levels by length of time displayed. You then scroll horizontally across your timeline, as well as click on individual items within it. Items within the timeline are shown using varying sizes and clicking on smaller items zooms them in along with the timeframe of the timeline. Once an individual items is clicked on it will display details and images if available as well as link to where the source data lives if pulled in from a feed.

This functionality is a bit hard to describe so thankfully they offer the ability to embed. Below I have provided a rich example of a timeline for the discography of Depeche Mode

Along with the timelines, they also offer three other methods to view the data. List view is a more traditional chronological view, Flipbook view is a coverflow type method, and Map View offers a world map view if the items are geo tagged.

If you’re a fan of nice visual interfaces and want to experiment with a totally different visual representation of your Lifestream, this service is worth taking a look at. You can take a look at the Lifestream Timeline I created here.

If you want to take a look at some other services that offer a less functional timeline, but a richer a Lifestreaming experience, take a look at Dandelife & iStalkr

Lastly, if you are really interested in timelines, there is a very popular code project called Simile Timeline that you can use to create your own as well.

Finding ways to limit the firehose of information has become a common theme lately. I recently read this interesting post on TechCrunch highlighting the need to filter the noise. Then I read on Mashable about how Twitter can be such a time sink. Sarah Perez then goes into more detail stating that Real People Don’t Have Time for Social Media.

For me it has gotten to the point where I can’t really effectively keep track of all the people I’m following on Twitter as well as several other social & Lifestreaming services. The other day I stated that Twitter really needs to add a feature allowing us to put followers into groups for filtering. Loic Le Meur sent out a tweet stating that he was planning on creating a separate Twitter account just to follow his top friends before someone reminded him he’s got this great new Twitter client he may be able to use for filtering. I still think that the functionality needs to be added on the Twitter platform and accessible through the API for that to be effective or else you will have 3rd party apps using their own external implementation schemes which won’t be as elegant a solution or transferable for that matter.

There have been several services released that are now attacking this issue for RSS readers & aggregators using interesting methods to identify and increase visibility of the “good” stuff. They’re using algorithms that take into account trackbacks, comments, Google reader share volume, and other data points to show items that are popular.

FriendFeed bubbles up stream items based on comments and likes. Great if all of your friends are on that service, but I would want to factor the data on the source services to act as indicators for items I should view. For instance Flickr could provide data for images on times viewed, favorited, commented on, and external referrers as methods to increase importance of a stream item.

I have other thoughts on this as well as methods to filter Twitter but I won’t go into detail for fear of lulling you to sleep. I’ll try to take the time to collect these thoughts better in a future post.

Here’s the latest collection of unique self hosted Lifestreams

Site: Eillalicio.us
Code: RSS Stream Wordpress Plugin

Site: A Division by Zer0
Code: Custom version of Simplelife Wordpress Plugin

Site: Benjamin Golub
Code: Custom using Django

Site: Griffin and Hoxie
Code: Unknown

Site: Juanxavier.com (now redirects to his Lifestream.fm Profile)
Code: Unknown

Site: Wally’s World
Code: Custom using FriendFeed & MyBlogLog API’s