Storytlr is a new service that focuses on lifestreaming with an added story telling angle. But it offers quite a bit more than just that niche based feature addition. It actually offers much more as I’ll cover shortly. The service was created by created by Laurent Eschenauer who told me that this is a personal project built with friend Alard Weisscher in their spare time. You would never know that after spending time on the site as it offers as clean and polished an experience as you will find on most of the top services.

Setting up an account begins like any other Lifestreaming service by adding your accounts from social media sites. They currently support Delicious, Flickr, Google Reader, Last.fm, Picasa, Qik, Seesmic, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, and the ability to add additional RSS feeds. You also have the ability to manually create posts in the categories of status, blog, link, image and audio, the last two of which are based on uploading the assets to their site.

The Storytell feature allows you to convey a single story by aggregating data from Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter based on a specific date range. Once configured, it then creates a custom overlayed media show displaying each of the items as a “boxy” mashup. This offers a nice gallery view that isolates the content by a single experience in a nice visual manner. I tried creating one but didn’t have proper content to adequately create a “story”. In creating mine I didn’t see the ability to flag which items should be part of the story based on the date ranges. I would think this would be necessary as some items that aren’t relevant would more than likely sneak in.

Click to view

While that feature is very nice, Storytlr offers many other great things. The Lifestream page itself can be most likened to one you would create using Wordpress and a Lifestreaming plugin. You can choose from several included themes as well as provide a custom header image, background image, and title for the Lifestream. But wait, there’s more. They offer a “widget” section that offers almost the same functionality as that of Wordpress with regards to providing the functionality in the sidebar. You have the ability to display and re-arange functions such as search, archives, latest comments, links to your profiles on other services, and even the ability to add your own widgets that can use custom html or javascript. They even offer the ability to host your Lifestream on your own domain.

The data displayed in the Lifestream offers subtle changes depending on the theme you choose. Each item offers the ability for commenting. Comments are then included as part of the latest comments widget in the sidebar. You also can flag individual items as private. There’s an add this function for every item. The Archive that appears in the sidebar is identical to that in Wordpress offering the ability to filter items by month and year.

Click to see my page

The last feature they offer is one that I’ve been very interested in with regards to Lifestreaming data. It’s the ablity to provide backups. The current implementation only offers the ability to export data from 10 sources as CSV files, but I like their thinking along these lines. They also state that in the future they will offer the ability to download binary files as well.

Overall I’m very impressed with this service especially considering the resources used to create it. It definitely creates a valueable offering for users interested in creating a customized Lifestream with Wordpress-like functionality and flexibility. Definitely worth a look and can only get better over time.

There’s another addition to the Lifestreaming Wordpress Themes collection with the relase of the Ambience theme. This is a new theme that just became available at Woo Themes designed by Liam McKay.

Here’s a list of the features

• Grid-based design, perfectly suited for a personal blog;
• Extravagent background graphics and front-end transparencies that’ll make you stand out from the crowd;
• Integrated, custom lifestreaming functionality;
• 5 gorgeous different colour schemes and styles!Integrated Theme Options (for WordPress) to tweak the layout, colour scheme etc. for the theme;
• Built-in Gravatar Support for Authors & Comments;
• Integrated Banner Management script to display randomized banner ads of your choice site-wide; and
• Widgetized Sidebars.

This looks like a very nice theme, but I would have liked to explore the admin interface to get more details on the Lifestreaming functionality and integration, as it appears to only offer the Lifestream on the sidebar. This is a premium theme at a cost of $70 for a single user license.

If you like this, be sure to also take a look at the Agregado theme which is freely available.

Update: I read here that the theme is using the Lifestream Plugin by David Cramer

I first heard about Popego when they were a presenter at the TechCrunch 50. Of all the services shown, I found this the most interesting because it appeared to be taking Lifestreaming to a new place. I also found it interesting that they are based out of Argentina, where I lived for a short while as a child. My initial visit a little over a month ago was a bit bumpy but they have since ironed out most issues, increased performance and added new features so it seemed like the right time to re-visit.

Yesterday I wrote a guest post on Louis Gray’s blog discussing how Lifestreaming has been a catalyst for what’s coming next on the web. Many Lifestreaming services are doing a good job of importing, displaying and allowing us to interact with the data. But the next step is creating logic and algorithms that do something with the data. The first of these are recommendation engines and that is what Popego, Strands, Twine and several other Semantic Web services are starting to do.

At a basic level Popego aims to reduce noise and increase relevance from your social graph firehose. They’ve created a recommendation engine on steroids. They provide a highly customized feed for users created by analyzing Lifestreaming data across several data points and offering manual controls to tweak it.

It all begins with the creation of an “interest profile“. First you create an account by adding all of your services. If you have a FriendFeed account this becomes an extremely fast and efficient process. Just provide your account info and they import all supported services automagically. Any additional services can be added manually. Once services are added, content is imported and analyzed to create a global tag cloud generated from the data.

Now that your interest profile has been created, you can spend some time tweaking it. This is done by manually removing any tags that you don’t want and then increasing or decreasing the importance of data based on the service it’s imported from. When you are happy with your settings its time to put it in action and create your “interest feed“. The interest feed is the recommendation engine for all items from other Popego users that match your interest profile.

The items that appear in the interest feed include title and link, when it was added, user and service source, associated tags, and % interest match to you. You can also interact with the item by commenting, loving, banning, or hiding. The last 3 provide behavioral actions which the system then learns from for future feeds. You can click on a username to display an overlay widget with a richly detailed profile summary.

There are several filters that allow for further tweaking of the feed. You can filter by one or more Video, Picture, Music, Website, Blog, and Microblog content types.  You can also choose to either have content delivered based on all users, only your friends, or related which I couldn’t determine its action. Lastly there is an interest match slider which can limit the results to only those that equal its defined relevancy percentage.

With regards to friends, I found the functionality a bit misguided and lacking. There currently is no concept of manually adding or following friends on Popego. Your friends are determined by the social graph that was imported from your services. I would like to manually create groups of Popego users and or select them individually as filters. Hopefully they address these issues in the future.

The Autoblog provides a public page to share your profile with anyone. Mine is at krynsky.popego.com. This essentially acts as a pseudo Lifestream page. It shows my interests in the form of a tag cloud and displays 10 items which appear to be a subset of data from my services (not in strict reverse chronological order) as if to provide a sampling of my interests. You can use many of the same filters and even page through more of my items. Also one of the cooler things is a list of other Popego users at the bottom of the page displayed with an interest match percentage where you can click on to display their profile widget.

Speaking of widgets, the same ones used on the site are portable and can be embedded on any web page. There are 2 flavors. The Picture & Bio widget as well as a facts widget. Below is mine, take a look and click on it to open up my profile.

Popego Facts Widget

Finally there is a Stats page which provides detailed information about the visitors to your profile page. This includes a tag cloud based on their interests, Avatars with their interest match percentage, and several graphs showing web common web services and interests data.

As you can see this is a service that has many areas of exploration and I feel I’ve just scratched the surface. While it doesn’t offer a traditional Lifestreaming experience, It does provide an exciting new way to discover content. One barrier for this type of service to be truly great and meaningful is having a large user base. I would really like to see my interest feed based on scouring a complete dataset of my friends Lifestreams. I hope that many users give this early vision of the next step in Lifestreaming a test drive and fulfill my selfish interests.

Some features I’d like to see (some are coming soon)

• A language filter. We don’t want items we can’t read in our feed
• A way to track friends and use them as a tweaking filter
• Provide a deeper (less general) tag cloud
• More efficient UI. Screen real estate is heavily wasted
• Extend search beyond users to data

Video Tour of Popego

Read more about Popego

• Popego Tailors the Social Graph to Your Interests – TechCrunch
• Popego finally pops up to make the web more meaningful – Startup Meme
• Mapping your brain with Imindi and Popego
• TechCrunch 50 Presenter Page [Includes Presentation Video]
  
• Popego Blog

Site: Stef
Code:Custom

Site: Joe Whitsitt
Code: SimpleLife Wordpress Plugin

Site: Max Limpag
Code: SweetCron

Site: Rob Williams
Code: FriendFeed Widgets

Site: Ian Kennedy
Code: MyBlogLog Widget

• Lifestreaming Will Change How Advertisers Approach Media – Part 1 – Pheedo Blog – Discusses how and why advertising should be used for Lifestreams.
• Swurl Combines Lifestreaming and Timelining | CenterNetworks – Review of Swurl
• What Is Lifestreaming? And Why Should You Do It? | Lea Woodward – Some great points on why you should be Lifestreaming
• Vincent Maher » Locative lifestreaming and the Grid – Information on The Grid. Mobile location based Lifestreaming apps.
• Wakoopa Begins Tracking Web Apps Alongside Their Desktop Counterparts – This is a great source to add to your Lifestream and it just got better.
• The Blog is Dead! – Yongfook’s slideshow presentation stating the current state of the blog and promoting Lifestreaming using SweetCron
• Strands Lifestreaming Service with Tools for Noise Reduction and a Focus on Social Discovery | Profy – Review of Strands.com Lifestreaming service
• I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You – Clive Thompson – NYTimes.com – Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.
• Review: Yahoo oneConnect – iPhone app that offers a Lifestreaming client which allows you to import services for friend viewing, including Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Twitter, and Last.fm.
• Lifestreaming: the next big thing on edopter.com – Lifestreaming page on edopter.com