Tonight I read over on SEO and Tech Daily that the Windows Live blog reported yesterday that they have now completed a rollout that has added a significant number of new sites that can now display web activities on your profile page.

You just need to visit http://profile.live.com/WebActivities/ to configure which ones you want to add. There are 20 new sites that have been added. Here’s a breakdown by category mentioned in the post:

• If you use a social networking service worldwide, you can add your updates from:
  Facebook, Twitter, Arto, Daum, Fotolog, Hevre, wow.ya.ru, Zoo
• If you share photos online you can now add updates to Windows Live from:
  Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, Metroflog, Bilddagboken
• If you have a blog, you can add it to Windows Live from:
  Wordpress, LiveJournal, Typepad, Overblog, or the custom blog activity, which works with Blogger and others.
• If you use any of these sites for information, music, video, or radio service, you can add them to Windows Live:
  MSN, The Zune Social, iLike, Pandora, Last.fm, Dada, Dailymotion
• And if you use a variety of different review sites, you can add them to Windows Live from:
  Digg, Flixster, StumbleUpon, Tripit, Yelp

I’ve also provided a screenshot of my web activities page below

There are several other new features with this release including the ability to import contacts from Facebook, Hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Tagged. The display of the Lifestream itself unfortunately hasn’t been updated and is a bit bland utilizing only text descriptors. In either case I’m glad that Microsoft is still pushing forward and dedicating resources towards increasing the Lifestreaming efforts on the Windows Live service. I’m keeping an eye on them hoping they continue to improve.

Screenshot of my profile page

Today marked a huge day at Facebook as they have decided to open up their data stream via API to developers. Another major development and a step to an open standard for Lifestreaming was the simultaneous announcement that Facebook was supporting Activity Streams.

Of course they didn’t totally open things up and ReadWriteWeb provided details on the reality of what exactly will flow through the stream. Even the LA Times joined the throngs of those criticizing Facebook challenging that they aren’t as open as Twitter and stating that much of data will continue to be private and maintained by them.

Anyways, even if things haven’t totally opened up I think this is a step in the right direction and hopefully is just the start of continued plans to break down their walled garden. TechCrunch provided a nice live Qik stream of the technology demos. You can view the videos of the event here.

So I got to thinking a little about the announcement and began to wonder about how people will be able to share their data outside of Facebook now that they are allowed to. I immediately thought about how by default your profile and all aspects are set to private. So even with this announcement, I’m fairly sure that people will need to manually opt-in to begin sharing their stream outside of Facebook.

I figured that many people may not know where they need to do this and what options they have so I decided to record a screencast providing some basic details on where these settings are and how you can change them.

Note video best watched in HD mode on YouTube

Update: Alison Driscoll has posted a many more details regarding the privacy settings including how to utilize lists to better control what you share. You can view the post here.

When I first began researching Lifestreaming back in February of 2007 I pointed to its origins which was a project started at Yale University by David Gelernter. David went on to write several books including Mirror Worlds which provided many of the concepts that would eventually lead to what we know as Lifestreaming today.

I hadn’t seen any activity from David regarding Lifestreaming beyond the older pages I came across on the web. That was until today when I saw this tweet from Alberto Escarlate where he rightfully exclaims “Did someone invent lifestreaming?”. His tweet linked to this great roundtable interview conducted by John Markoff and Clay Shirky.

From Left to right: John Markoff, David Gelernter, Clay Shirky. Photo courtesy of Edge.org

This is a great discussion that has a transcript provided on the page along with 2 videos. I was glad to see that David discussed Lifestreaming quite a bit. Here are a few of the interesting excerpts I came across.

On his thoughts about Lifestreaming

Well, Lifestreams was already my idea that instead of keeping my information in separate pieces of digital Tupperware with some of it in this app, and some of it in that app, and some of it in the file system, and some of it in my Web brower, and some of it on my laptop, and some in my palm, and some in my cell, and blahblahblah — I didn’t want to do that. I wanted every information object I owned arranged in an electronic diary or journal or narrative. Or ‘Lifestream’ is what I call it.

Here is an answer to a question by John Markoff which is very profound and similar to what I discussed as well in my post on why you should be Lifestreaming.

The case you raise, John, is a fascinating case because we always said, “This is not just a small software thing. This is going to be your life. I would love to be able to inherit a Lifestream from my grandparents and see what their lives were really like and there is no reason I shouldn’t leave my Lifestream to my children and my descendants. There’s no reason why these shouldn’t go for centuries or millennia. Or let you immerse yourself in the lives of your forbears, the lives of an earlier time. In such a radically a-historical world as ours, it’s important. But on the other hand, there are cases where I want to suppress the past and it’s important for me that I be able to do that. Certainly it is conceivable. It is doable.

There are two videos that also accompany the article. Below is a screenshot of the second video showing exactly where David begins to speak about Lifestraming. I’ve provided this as a pointer since the video player they are using on the site does not offer playback times for me to direct you to.

I’ve only provided a small nugget of the interview and highly encourage you read the transcript of the discussion as It lets you peer into the thoughts of the first pioneer behind what we are doing in the Lifestreaming space today.

A while ago I watched a video interview Robert Scoble did with the folks at Small Worlds. This is a new virtual world service that is being compared to Second Life. The difference here though is that it doesn’t require you to download a client and runs right within your browser.  They’ve also managed to create a very simple environment to navigate and interact with compared to many of the other services available.

So why am I writing about this? Well because they have tied in aspects of Lifestreaming in a whole new way that hasn’t been done by anyone else. This virtual world, like most others, has many of the familiar elements such as avatars, homes, and objects you can buy and put in your home. The difference here being that you can tie in social media services to your virtual objects.

Here is an image showing my home and several virtual objects with the associated services that are tied to them.

If you join Small Worlds, you can visit me here

Here are some details about the objects you see in my virtual world above

• The stereo is powered by my playlists at Last.fm
• The Plasma is powered by searches or playlists I create on YouTube
• The mural is powered by images I define from Flickr
• The painting is powered by my tweets from Twitter

But it’s very hard to demonstrate how innovative this service is in a static blog post with images so I’ve created a detailed screencast demonstrating these features for you below.

My Lifestreaming functionality demo in Small Worlds

Note that I uploaded this video in HD quality which is better viewed directly on YouTube here

As you can see this truly does offer a very new innovative way to share your Lifestream. It may not be the quickest or most streamlined way to do it, but definitely the coolest. Time will tell how this functionality plays out on Small Worlds but keep in mind this is just one small aspect of the service. There is a whole lot more going on here including games, missions, and plenty more that make this a must try for anyone interested in virtual worlds. They’ve even created an API that should provide some very interesting extensions for 3rd party developers.

One thing to keep in mind is the fact that the service is free to join and you need to earn gold to buy objects for your apartment. This can be done several ways including completing missions as well as purchasing with real world money.

It would be very cool and interesting to experiment using this with several other users in the room with me. Perhaps I can get a few of you guys to join and help me test that. If you create an account on the service leave a comment with your user details below. Perhaps I can schedule a time to invite you over for a virtual world meetup at my apartment.

Some additional resources to check out

• You can see the video interview Robert did here
• Information and review from BBGsite.com
• Review from TechPluto

This is a guest post from reader Trae Blain. You can visit his site at traeblain.com. If you are interested in writing a guest post, just head on over to the contact page

Puddle is a self hosted lifestreaming script created as a side project from mobile game developer, OrangePascal. Puddle is simple to setup with no need for a database and can get you quickly up and running with it’s easy to use interface. This script—being young—still has a few hurdles to get over, but it’s promising feature-set could lead to an excellent self-hosted lifestreaming solution.

Installation and Setup

Kicking off the testing of Puddle was a pleasure as I simply needed to upload the script and I was ready to start adding services. The readme suggested setting the directory’s permission to 777, but I didn’t feel comfortable with this so I left mine at 755 and it is working just fine. The service adding interface is simple but elegant with nice AJAX menus that are nicely categorized. Puddle supports 36 service including a wide range of service types.

Puddle treats each imported item more like blog posts, instead of highly condensed items like most services. Puddle also can be used as your blogging system as it has the ability to create posts with a nice TinyMCE editor. Treating all items in this manner allows for easy integration with Disqus commenting system, which the script natively supports. The sidebar is fully customizable with the built-in plugins or with HTML/Text modules.

Nice

The script has some nice features that are often overlooked in things like lifestream plugins for Wordpress. Chief among them is the importing and displaying some of the gathered data above and beyond just links. Services like Flickr and Vimeo have options for just importing your uploaded media or also including the “Liked” media. Tumblr imports the actual media posted instead of just a link to the original page. And Brightkite imports will display a small Google Map with pushpin identifying the location.

Not so Nice

As I said, this system is young. Although the setup was so simple and fun I was surprised when I had to add a cronjob to get the script to update from the services. Something so simple to run should offer a pseudo or simulated cron system in the backend to update the services on its own. Also, again due to it’s age, there’s not much documentation. I dove into a couple of the themes and although it doesn’t appear to be a difficult theming system, someone that doesn’t have much knowledge in php will feel a bit uncomfortable.

If you are looking for self-hosted solution for your lifestream, Puddle is a great start.  The script is hosted at Google Code and open sources so you can modify it to your hearts content.