If it wasn’t for this tweet from Frank Gruber I would have never found out about AOL’s new Lifestreaming service at buddyupdates.com and chances are if you wouldn’t have either. Quite surprisingly I didn’t see any of the major news outlets like ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Webware or TechCrunch review or mention it. So when I decided to take a look at it I didn’t expect much.

By their own description “Buddy Updates is a free service that lets you view and share your online activities with your AIM buddies”. Sure sounded like a Lifestreaming service to me so I went ahead and started looking under the hood. If you already have an AIM account signup is a snap. Just login and you can access the service immediately. Once logged in you are taken to an “everyone” activity page and voila, you already have a page streaming all of the activities of your existing AIM buddies.

AOL has done a good job of keeping this service dead simple. There are only two other pages besides the “everyone” page titled “just me” & “setup”. The just me page is exactly what you think. A personal filtered view of stream activity, while the setup page is nice and clean and allows you to add web services to your stream. They currently support 14 services which are Twitter, Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Xanga, Flickr, Webshots,  Del.icio.us, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Blip.TV, Viddler, YouTube, and MySpace. They also support adding your own sites. Lastly,  they provide activity from many of their own existing properties as well.

After the simple setup I went to the “just me” page and was happy to see that they had already imported some data from the services I added. The look is simple and clean whereby my AIM icon is merged with a service icon to show me a list of updates from each of my added services. It did not import data from my Flickr or YouTube accounts so I don’t know how they handle media on the page.

Viewing of the updates is done one of two ways. The site provides a custom url you can give people to view in a browser or they can see updates within their AIM client. If you want to see an example you can visit my page here.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with AOL’s entry into the Lifestreaming game. Not so much based on the funcionality of their offering, but more because they seem to know their audience well and have created a service that is tailored specifically to them. The site is designed well and simple enough to ease people into the joys of Lifestreaming. The fact that it’s tapping the existing AIM user base make it another large player poised towards gaining more mainstream adoption of Lifestreaming.

I’m guessing AOL (like Facebook) has seen the future of Lifestreaming and realized it’s a no brainer and of great value to add this service to their existing user base. And just like Facebook if the users are already on the service it makes the barrier to entry low and gives them another reason to remain on the service. Very well played AOL, I’m impressed.

On the heels of a slew of new features with their recent 2.0 update, Socialthing has recently released some more.

• Added new services Brightkite, Plurk, Seesmic, and Guitar Hero
• Added several new shortcuts
• Visual color queues for new items in the Lifestream
• Visual icons detailing the types of account activity available for each service and publishing capabilities

You can read more about the update here. If you’re interested in trying out SocialThing I was able to secure invites for Lifestream Blog readers. Just go create an account and use the invite code “letmeinnow” without the quotes.

In playing with the update I added my Brightkite account to SocialThing and I wanted to show you some of the more granular details that can be available when you dig a little deeper into adding a service.

Below you will see an image of the options available when I added my Brightkite account to SocialThing:

Here you see quite a few options

• Ability to set an individual service private
• Multiple options for who you want to share this service
• Ability to use this service as your SocialThing Avatar (this is available for all services)
• And lastly specific options for sharing content available on the Brightkite service

Here are the options when adding Brightkite to FriendFeed

All I have is the ability to add my username with no other options.

For some, flexible options when importing and displaying their data from a service may not be important, but I find these details to be interesting to share with others when digging deeper into these services. I’ve written a longer detailed post about this in the past.

Last year we saw the release of SimpleLife. It was a Lifestreaming plugin for Wordpress based off of Simplepie. Today I came across the blog of Thomas Trumble who has recently spent time editing the original plugin to add some additional features.

Here’s a List:

• Addition of 6 extra feeds for a total of 9
• Addition of built in support for feeds from Yelp, YouTube Favorites, Google Reader Shared Items, Pandora Favorite Artists and Songs, Plaxo Pulse, 2 Amazon Wishlists, Tumblr and StumbleUpon
• Implementation of Db0’s Google Reader Lifestream Archive and a modified version of his Google Reader Comment Tracking concept that supports and formats feeds from Twitter, Del.icio.us, Netflix, coComment, Disqus and Intense Debate
• Implementation of Db0’s concept for showing the number of items and length of time in the lifestream
• Commented out the charts of recent activity – they just didn’t seem useful to me, but it’s there if you want to use them and my additions should show up in them
• Addition of tons of additional favicons for streaming services so you don’t need to add them yourself, whatever you want is probably now included

If you are a user of the original plugin or are looking for one to add to your Wordpress blog it’s worth a look. You can see the plugin in action here and you can find his plugin page here.

• Social Commerce: Lifestream Marketing – “I am convinced that the concept behind FriendFeed will be a mass phenomenon and maybe it will even become one of the most important new channels for marketers, because it’s the closest digital equivalent to a real-life recommendation.”
• Christopher Blizzard » announcing whoisi – Announcement of new Lifestreaming service whoisi.com
• Pipes: XBOX 360 GamerTag to RSS (by InternetDuctTape.com) – Enter your XBOX 360 gamer tag to get an RSS feed of the games you have been playing. Great addition as a source for your Lifestream.
• Lifestreaming Application Oneswirl is on the market – Details of the backend used to build the service with hopes for a buyer
• The Otterman Empire @ work: the guid , the bad and the ugly. repetition is what lifestreaming is, lifestreaming is repetition… – Discusses using guids to reduce duplication and signal to noise ratio
• Wall Street Journal – Ways to Follow Your Friends on the Web – Article on Lifestreaming that offers a primer and covers several different services
• Adding richness to activity streams | FactoryCity – “Activity streams could become much more valuable by being easier for web services to consume, interpret and to provide better filtering and weighting of shared activities to make it easier for people to get access to relevant information”
• New York Press - Feeding Frenzy – Story about Lifestreaming I was interviewed for at the New York Press
• Carbon account, meet lifestreaming. Lifestreaming, meet carbon accounting! at Greenmonk: the blog – Will carbon accounting software and its requirement for constant inputs from all levels of business bring lifestreaming applications into the Enterprise 2.0 fold?
• Pistachio Consulting Inc. » Woo Hoo! A DIY Embryonic Brainsieve – Interesting widget & Facebook app created to display a fixed number or items by popularity from several feeds.

Yesterday I wrote about Swurl but today found a great new feature I hadn’t seen during my original testing of the service. I had added my Last.fm account but it hadn’t imported my “loved” tracks yet. Today when I revisited I was very surprised to find what it does when importing your tracks.

Here’s an example from Marshall Kirkpatrick’s page on Swurl

There are several cool features that supplement imported tracks. There is a play button that will stream the song, if you mouseover you will see the cover of the cd, there will be a download link for the track, and finally you are presented with lyrics for the track. Some of the features will not always work for tracks as they are apparently running track data through a variety of services to achieve this which aren’t always available.

FriendFeed has also recently added the ability to stream enclosures on the site in a flash player. Yesterday I started coming across some feed items from user edythe labeled “Last Loved MP3’s” that included the inline player. I was curious and wanted to know how she was doing this. It turns out she was using this yahoo pipe which converts the Last.fm recently loved tracks XML feed to a RSS feed including links to MP3’s from Seeqpod.

If you want to do the same:

1. Enter your Last.fm user id on the Yahoo Pipe page
2. click “Run Pipe”
3. Click on the RSS icon titled “More options”
4. Click on “Get as RSS”
5. Now copy the url in your browser to your buffer
6. Go to FriendFeed and click on the “Me” tab
7. Click on the “Edit/add” link under Services
8. Click on “Blog” under Blogging
9. Paste the url from your buffer and click on the “Import Blog” button

Now just go start loving tracks on Last.fm and watch as they start to appear in your feed. Keep in mind that this feed is just including links for tracks if they are available on Seeqpod and in many cases they won’t work properly. Nevertheless it’s a pretty cool little hack to share your loved songs on FriendFeed.

These are some really cool features that are taking the Lifestreaming experience to the next level by by offering immediate exposure for discovering new music your friends listen to.  It’s great seeing new innovation in the space by leveraging additional services and functionality and I look forward to watching this logic applied in other areas.