If you’re not familiar with SweetCron, it’s a very popular opensource web app that was allows you to self-host your own Lifestream. Released just over a year ago, and developed by web designer Yongfook, it was designed with beautiful aesthetics in mind. It has become one of the most popular Lifestreaming apps out there for individual use and if you have been watching the Lifestream Galleries that I frequently post where I highlight some of the best custom Lifestream galleries on the web, you’ll notice that many of them use SweetCron.

Well I’ve recently come across a developer named Wan Mhod Azri who has been blogging about and releasing all kinds of mods for the SweetCron platform. His latest release provides a tutorial for creating an iPhone compatible SweetCron theme. But this is just the latest in many projects he’s worked on for SweetCron.

Here’s a few others

• Multiple User SweetCron Release which includes the source file
• Adding tinyMCE WYSIWYG In Sweetcron Blog Editor
• Enable Multiple User Feeds In SweetCron part1 & part 2
• Adding New Option In SweetCron

If you are a SweetCron user then you are definitely going to want to visit Wan’s site and follow him on Twitter to learn more about ways to tweak your SweetCron.

I was at BlogWorld Expo sitting next to Louis Gray at a panel when news came out that Twitter lists had been launched. Louis went to his Twitter page and sure enough he saw the feature and started playing with it. I on the other hand did not see the feature when I went to my page. Because we saw the news on Twitter we didn’t realize it was a small limited rollout of the feature to a select few.

As Louis continued to test the feature we noticed the url path to get to find out what lists a given user is on which is http://twitter.com/<username>/lists/memberships. But you only will get the results if your Twitter account is list enabled, otherwise all you get is a blank screen.

So I asked Louis if he could pull up my name to see if I was on any lists and he obliged and then sent me the screenshot you see below.

From the image you can glean quite a bit of information and start to see the value that this will bring to Twitter and its users. From the image I can see the users that have put me on lists along with the names they gave them and how many other people follow the list. I can imagine someone coming out with a tag cloud for users based on the keywords used in the lists they appear on. Or perhaps instead of users who are self serving when they add themselves to WeFollow (present company included) someone will create a version that is based on what others have deemed you. That follower number is also interesting as it can act as an authority value coupled with the users who are adding them. As you can see there are some great possibilities here. Conversely it will make for an interesting search to see who’s landed on the most douchebag lists

Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit Twitter CEO Evan Williams stated that he hates the much criticized Twitter suggested user list and can’t wait for this new feature to be relased. I too am very excited about the possibilities offered by having this functionality built-in directly into the service and accessible by the API. I’m sure we’re going to see some more interesting services that will utilize this data to create authority and trusted users lists that can then be used for all sorts of interesting things.

I can’t wait to be able to say goodbye to all the 3rd party kludgy external lists/groups features. I’m currently maintaining groups in Tweetdeck as well as a separate lists in the iPhone Simplytweet app. It will be a race to see which desktop and mobile apps release a lists capable versions. I can easily see myself jumping ship to another app that offers support first. I’m so excited and wait very anxiously for this to be released.

In a blog post on October 10th the team at Storytlr let users know that they will be shutting down the service at the end of this year. It’s just another casualty in a long list of Lifestreaming services that have shut down over the last year.

On shutting down…from their blog post

The reason is simple: our lives have moved on, kids were born, house were bought, new projects appeared and we don’t have time anymore to operate this service properly…We have spent the last months looking for alternatives, potential partners, and even thought about creating a startup around this project. Yet, in the end, nothing did really make sense for us and we have decided to pull the plug. It was a tough decision to make, it is a sad day, and we feel sorry for our passionate users who have put so much effort into their page and who have helped us improve the service through their many comments.

It’s a bummer because I felt Storytlr was one of the top personal Lifestreaming services out there. They especially excelled in offering very similar functionality to running a self-hosted Wordpress blog. The silver lining in their decision is that they’ve decided to open source the platform. Also, unlike the shutdown of Swurl which gave no warning when they pulled the plug, they are offering several backup options. They already provided the ability to export CSV files of your data. In addition to that they will make available a way to download all of your binary files that have been uploaded as a zip file. They’ve also created a Google Group to discuss issues moving forward. I applaud them for both helping their users and now providing their platform for the benefit of others. This is definitely a great service that will be missed. I wish both Laurent & Alard the best.

Here are the posts I wrote about Storytlr here on Lifestream Blog

• New Service Storytlr Offers Lifestreaming With a Few Twists
• Watch the US Airways Plane Crash Unfold in a Lifestream
• Storytlr Continues to Impress with a Batch of New Features
• Storytlr Continues Evolution by Adding Pages and Mediastreams

[Note: at the time of this post I had trouble both visiting the Storytlr site as well as the blog post. Hopefully things will be online again soon]

Today I came across an interesting development project called 3D Lifestream created by Nick Selvaggio. Nick is the author of the Lifestream module for Drupal that exposes Lifestream data created by the Activity Stream module and provides an interface for Flash/Flex apps.

So Nick took his Lifestream data from Drupal and using his module connected it to the Papervision library which is a toolkit for creating 3D objects and animation in Flash. He provides some details on how he went about creating this mashup and provides a download of the .fla file used to create the .swf. so that anyone else interested can get a jumpstart on creating their own version.

I played with his demo (screencast below) a bit which wasn’t too exciting since it was only Tweets and Delicious links which actually didn’t link out for me. It would have been nice to see photos or videos but overall it’s demo of the concept that matters here which pretty cool and could be used for some interesting 3D visualization that include multiple users streams or other rich 3D content as well.

I recorded a quick little screencast to show this to you

Next week from October 15th to the 17th I will be headed to Las Vegas to attend and cover BlogWorld Expo. I’m excited about this on several levels. In monitoring the buzz online leading up to the conference, I can see that a large number of folks that I follow and admire will be in attendance. I always look forward to connecting in person with the people I interact with online but rarely get to see.

There are quite a few panels that I’m looking forward to.  An obvious one is Lifestreaming & Your Business on Thursday the 15th at 1:30pm where Steve Rubel will no doubt be providing his knowledge and experience on how to utilize Lifestreaming tools and concepts effectively. Then on Friday at 11:30am the stars collide when so many speakers I enjoy will all be presenting at the same time. There’s Robert Scoble talking about social media changing news, Chris Pirillo discussing monetization methods for blogs, Louis Gray on technology and the real-time web, or Micah Baldwin and Jesse Stay on the wrong ways to use Twitter. I might be panel hopping to try and get some tidbits from each. There is plenty more I’m looking forward to but I’ll return with what I’ve found during and after the conference.

Then on October 27 & 28th the 140 Character Conference (known as 140Conf) makes its way to Los Angeles. This is a travelling conference that most recently appeared in New York and after Los Angeles it will be making its way to London.

Here’s how Jeff Pulver (its creator) describes it:

At the #140conf events, we look at twitter as a platform and as a language we speak. Over time it will neither be the only platform nor the only language. #140conf is not an event about  microblogging or the place where people share twitter “tips and techniques” but rather where we explore the effects of the real-time Internet on Business.

I will be speaking on day 1 with several some other people that share a passion for Lifestreaming much the way I do. They include Dan Honigman who inspired the Austin Statesman project and recently released a Lifestreaming white paper, Kevin Sablan whom I’ve watched leverage Lifestreaming and its tools to help tell stories and bring us news, and Mona Nomura who has effectively used Lifestreaming tools like FriendFeed, SweetCron, Twitter and others. I’m really looking forward to joining these three great people to both educate and provide several aspects of Lifestreaming.