I came across an amusing post by Glenn Slaven (author of the great FriendFeed Comments Wordpress Plugin) where he had discovered that 2 FriendFeed users (Deepak & Kevin,) appeared in Google’s search results as more relevant than the about page. He mentions some other interesting ranks after clicking on the more results.

I decided to take Glenn’s lead and progress this to the next level by listing the top 30 FriendFeed users based on those results. Here you will find some of the usual suspects that always make these lists, but there are lots of new faces. Keep in mind that this is just a current snapshot, but it will be interesting to monitor over time.

Top 30 FriendFeed Users Based on Google Ranking

1. Robert Scoble
2. Louis Gray
3. Paul Bucheit
4. Steve Rubel
5. Chris Baskind
6. Mr. News Junk
7. MG Siegler
8. Frederic
9. Muhammad Saleem
10. Scott Beale
11. Fred Wilson
12. Dobromir Hadzhiev
13. Michael Arrington
14. Grant Bierman
15. Corvida
16. Leo Laporte
17. Morton Fox
18. Chris Pirillo
19. Dave Winer
20. Johannes Kleske
21. Ryne Nelson
22. Brian Solis
23. Chris Dibona
24. Veronica Belmont
25. Tuaw
26. Elliot Ng
27. Mark Krynsky
28. Brian Daniel Eisenberg
29. Thomas Ho
30. Bob Lee

Today I started thinking about how cool it would be if I could see the locations of my Twitter friends on a Map. After spending some time Googling for such a tool I was only able to find one, and interestingly enough it only became available a few days ago.

I came across this post by Andy Murdoch who has created a Yahoo Pipe that puts nice pushpin representations of all your Twitter users on a map of the world. It also allows you to scroll through them displaying their names and Bio’s. Also, since it’s a Yahoo Pipe you can embed it into your own site.

Here’s an example using my Twitter account.

This is the first guest post from reader Terri Ann. I wrote about her custom Lifestream previously here. You can visit her blog at blog.ninedays.org and don’t forget to check out her lifestream. If you are interested in writing a guest post, just head on over to my contact page

The other day on css tricks.com, they posted about creating your own social home which appeared to me as more of a personal/social portal than a lifestream. A lifeportal, if you will.

Chris, over there, provided a great download to get you started building your own lifeportal using only jQuery and JSON to query the API’s for three popular web services: Flickr, Twitter and ScrnShots.

His article also walks you through everything those scripts are doing, giving you the tools to really customize the download to suit your own needs.
It’s those customization skills that are so critical with lifestreams and lifeportals since everyone uses their own set of social networking, social bookmarking and other social sharing services.

The way I see it, the main difference between lifeportals and most lifestreams is that this idea or a portal page is based more on the service and the latest information from that service than the date. How else can I put it? Like a page of feeds about the now, more than the overall time line and progression.

One great lifeportal really brings that idea of the now together. Jared Zimmerman has really simplified the idea and uses Flickr, Amazon, Yahoo!, Facebook, 43Things as well as other APIs to show more about his life, right now.

I’ve stumbled across a few other lifeportals that really show the strengths in this idea of separation of feeds rather than the integration into a time line.

Jon Phillips Streaming – Jon uses Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg as well as integrating other information like his sites and Skype contact.

Katy in Las Vegas – A very similar organization as Jon’s but uses Twitter, a blogging RSS feed, StumbleUpon and then shows her social network profiles and contact form in a similar manner, really keeping the flow of the page very consistent. Oh, and it’s a super cute look (is the girl in me showing again?)

Which do you prefer to use for yourself or see on another person’s site?
Where do you think this trend is going? Do you think people are going to focus more on the now or the time line idea?

I was contacted by Gina Pace of the New York Press for a story they were writing on Lifestreaming. I spent about 40 minutes with her on the phone where I spent a good deal of time explaining the concept from its early beginnings to where it is now and where I thought it was going. It was a great conversation.

She interviewed several others including Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed, John McCrea of Plaxo and Kevin Lim.

It would have been nice if she mentioned this site and other topics we had discussed, but overall it resulted in a good article which you can read here

I read today over at Startup Dunia, a blog covering Indian startups, about two new Lifestreaming services. I only have some brief information gathered from each of them as both services are currently invite only.

The first is called LifeinLines which appears to be more of an online diary based service.

From the site:

LiL has integrated multiple technologies to make it very simple for you to capture your thoughts anytime, anywhere, using any media. You can write on the LiL website or send LiL an email, a message from your Gtalk or an SMS/MMS. If words and images fall short of what you want to say, you can even make a phone call and record your voice.

After touring the site I didn’t see the ability to import from other services, but one can only imaging they would be adding this as an option soon. There were definitely some interesting features with regards to creating friend groups, ratings and the multitude of posting methods. If you find this site interesting you should take a look at Dandelife which I feel offers a more mature and richer feature set.

The second service is called LifeBlob and offers the visual timeline metaphor which seems to be a UI method that is growing in popularity.

From the site:

What differentiates Lifeblob is that your timeline has a social angle to it. When you make a post on your timeline, you can include a list of people who are related to the post or who were participants if the post is about a real event. And instantly, the post not only becomes a part of your timeline, but also shows up on the timelines of all these participants, thereby establishing a relationship ( a.k.a bridge ) between all these timelines.

At first glance it looks fairly similar to Dipity which I’ve written about. The timeline interface itself isn’t quite as robust as Dipity’s with regards to fluidity and zoom factors. Also, I was only able to view profiles that had imported images from Picasa and blog posts. I liked how they grouped the images in the timeline along with the expansions. Each timeline also offered tags for keywords and locations which if clicked on, offered a filtered timeline view. These filters are also available from the home page.

You can visit the original story about these services from the Startup Dunia site here.