I began using Retaggr last year primarily for the signature widget for my personal email account. I really liked the features they had to help build an online profile. Their offering makes all the top services pale in comparison.
First off, they offer support for more services than anyone out there except maybe Profilactic. If you have a FriendFeed account it can even automatically import all of your services by simply providing that account. But it isn’t just the extensive services that make them stand out. They offer a clean interface to add almost anything you would ever want to in an online profile. Better yet, once you create your profile you can use it outside the server in many ways. Like I said, I use it as a signature but you can also create a highly customizeable widget to promote your profile on your own site and elsewhere as well.
Here’s my widget
Here’s my email signature
Well now they have taken their profile creation tools to the next level. They now offer a dedicated profile page that also acts as a Lifestream by importing the data from the services you add. They provide a very clean Lifestream that isn’t a mashup of all your activity in a single feed but rather offer it in sections based on the service type. So you have all your microblogging in one section, all your photos in another, and all your comments in yet another. I personally like having this approach as an added bonus to the traditional Lifestream.
There are also many other customization options available for the profile pages as well. In any case I really can’t get into much detail because the overall setup options and customizations available on the Retaggr service are pretty phenomenal. You can really get lost in all the choices you have. So check it out and have some fun over there. It’s worth it.
You can read more about the new features on their blog here.
Two months ago I wrote a post about how the big boys are starting their Lifestreaming initiatives. At the time Yahoo had just rolled out their new profile pages and they really seemed to be these isolated outposts without any functionality worth mentioning.
Well the other day they finally added the ability to provide a Lifestream from a pretty large list of services. I won’t list all the sites but you can see a good number of them from the image below.
Adding services is very easy with an auto-discovery tool they provide. There’s also a few levels of privacy to determine who you want to share your stream with. Lastly you can easily delete individual stream items should you care to do so.
Once finished they offer a version of your Lifestream on your main profile page as well as a dedicated Lifetreaming page. There also appears to be a page provides a stream of all your friends but I can’t really test it since I currently only have one user as a connection. Perhaps you can connect with me over there and start adding services so I can see what it looks like.
As of right now Yahoo is in the lead over Google and Microsoft with regards to a Lifestreaming initiative. Google currently only offers links to external services without ability to import. Microsoft offers a handful of services and does a poor job of displaying the data on the profile. It will be interesting to watch each player develop their profiles over the year.
One thing I’m curious about is as to where does this movement leave (Yahoo owned) MyBlogLog? There is definitely duplication now amongst the two services and it would appear that Yahoo will continue to push forward more Lifestreaming functionality. I guess time will tell.
On a sidenote I just wanted to say WTF were all of these guys smoking when they decided to come up with GUID’s as the basis for profile URL’s? It boggles the mind.
Here’s what I mean. My profile URL for each service:
Today I came across the Felton Report. What is this report? Well I see a beautiful visual Lifestream. It was created by one Nicholas Felton who is a graphic designer based in New York City. He is also the co-creator of the data-tracking website Daytum.com. I had recently signed up and gotten access to this site which is currently in private beta. On the surface it appeared to be a Lifestreaming site but after playing around for a little it appears to only provide the ability to create lists and data sets manually to generate your stream data and offers no ability to import data or from link to a 3rd party service.
The images below are from 2 pages of his report and show the uniquely interesting method he has used to visualize his Lifestreaming data. I would be interested in getting more information on the tools he used to aggregate the data because as I mentioned I didn’t see that ability in his Daytum service.
You can view the whole report here. He also has other annual reports and design work which can be found online at his site feltron.com and mgfn.net.
Last night Robert Scoble said that he wished he had created a room on FriendFeed so he could aggregate various data sources for the US Airways crash yesterday. Robert also wrote details about how the story broke on the real-time web today. I was also notified that a user created such an activity stream. The result is a remarkably nice visual account of the events by Kevin Sablan using the premier feature of the Storytlr service.
Click image to view
From Kevin’s blog post:
To make the presentation, I used Twitter Search to find comments with the word “Hudson” from people within 50 miles of New York City. I waded through those comments to find a handful of people whose comments, pictures and video might work to tell a story. I imported the content from each of the sources into storytlr by simply providing their usernames. The hard part was editing, or what Tim Windsor calls curating, the approximately 700 bits of information into some semblance of a disjointed story.
You can read the full details about the process on the post here. There is also a post on the Storytlr blog here.
The idea of creating an activity stream around an event isn’t totally new. Several people have already been doing this using rooms on FriendFeed. Sarah Perez recently created the CES 2009 room where she provided coverage of keynotes and breaking news as it happened. I also wrote about the creation of one for the Ubuntu developer summit as well. Having a real-time dynamic activity stream for a live event is one of the best applications I have seen to date. I think we are going to see this become pretty commonplace this year as the value for creating one is huge.
Today I was alerted by FranK Gruber of a new service created to backup your Lifestream. The site is available at the very starightforward and appropriately named Lifestreambackup.com and they are currently taking names for those interested when they launch.
From the site:
Each year more of your life is stored online. While many services will back up your desktop, we haven’t found anything that will backup your lifestream. So we are building it. In a couple of weeks, we will launch with the ability to manage all of your online accounts in one place. You enter your credentials once per site, set it for daily or weekly backup, and then we do the rest
image courtesy of Flickr user alexmuse
Frank did an interview with one of the founders. During the video they discuss some of the concepts at a high level. The service appears to act as an interface and conduit to get the data you create on an initial set of supported web services (Flickr, Blog via RSS, Google Docs, Twitter, Youtbue, and Facebook initially) to an Amazon S3 account. They exclaim that “If it has an API that allows us to pull data, we are happy to back it up for you”. They also offer the ability to link to your own S3 account if you already have one to save on the $6.95 per 10Gb monthly charge.
Other than that there aren’t any more details. I’m very curious as to how the service will work. I’m wondering what the UI and configuration options will look like. I’m also curious as to what actual data will be stored and what the associated formats will be. In any case this sounds like a geat idea and beyond being useful as a backup it can also be a great archive. If an interface can get written to pull, display and search the data as well it could become very useful. Also with recent announcements from Google about closing down services and no doubt more of this trend to occur in the future, creating backups seems like a very important proposition. I’m looking forward to its release so I can try it out.
Lifestream blog provides the latest news, reviews and resources for the tools and services to create a Lifestream. It also provides information on the social services used to fuel them. You can follow author Mark Krynsky on:
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