Last December Edo Segal wrote a post for TechCrunch titled “The Dawning Of Ambient Streams” on how the evolution of Lifestream technologies will bring about some major changes in our future.

He states

We will be seeing the first swells of this coming tsunami in the years to come, but for our children the ambient sense will play a bigger and bigger role as it slowly evolves and weaves itself into their consciousness much like Google search weaved itself into their memory functions.

He then goes on to describe the building blocks that make up what he calls an ambient stream and then provides a diagram to illustrate how they may enter our lives.

Before these building blocks can create an ambient stream which is not overwhelming, all of this data needs to pass through a filter. The Holy Grail is a filter which only serves up information which is relevant based on who you are, your social graph, what you or your friends are doing now, what you or friends have done before, and in context of other information you are consuming. It needs to be delivered wherever you are and on whatever device or display can deliver the ambient stream: mobile phone, laptop computer, TV, heads-up display in vehicle or inside your glasses.

Definitely some interesting thoughts which make a lot of sense as we move forward in the years to come and find ways to manage the data.

via TechCrunch | Beyond Realtime Search: The Dawning Of Ambient Streams.

I’ve been seeing quite a few Storytlr sites pop up now that the code has been released as open source. Ars Technica who like the service and had written about it in the past decided to write a post with details of the open source release along with setup information. The post was written by Ryan Paul and he even goes into some of the basics about Lifestreaming and offers up some alternatives to Storytlr.

From the post

The code, which is available under the Apache license, is written in PHP and uses the Zend framework. It’s not a masterpiece of modern software, but it’s reasonably well-written and relatively easy to customize. Storytlr has some intriguing features, but it never seemed all that compelling to me as a hosted service—just another place on the Internet to accumulate my crap. As an open source project, however, it’s a whole lot more interesting because now users can deploy it on any infrastructure and extend it by adding support for additional services.

via Ars Technica Make your own lifestream with open source Storytlr

There are several sites out there allowing us to add ourselves to lists describing our skills, specialties or other information about ourselves. Wefollow is a popular one and I’ve also  seen many use Twibes as well. That’s fine and dandy but we know many folks see themselves as things they clearly are not. For instance I’d be very leery of many people who add themselves to a “social media expert” list.

A few weeks ago I was talking to Jesse Stay (developer of  SocialToo) about an idea I had to create an identity page for people on Twitter by building a tag cloud to analyze the keywords made up from the lists they’re on. Jesse who seems to know about every Twitter app out there  told me that there already was one and sent me the info. So I visited the site and gave it a try.

Here’s the page it created for me

click image to view the page

You can see in the image all the keywords used to describe me based on the 142 lists I am currently on. The more times the word is used, the bigger it appears on my tag cloud. You can also click on any of the words in the cloud and it displays the lists you are on that use it and the people that put you on them. Lastly as a nice discovery feature it displays the top followed lists on Twitter for that given keyword.

This app was created by Mustexist and you can go create your cloud here. It’s pretty enlightening to see the keywords that other folks use to describe you. I also feel that it paints a much more realistic picture of who people are by crowdsourcing that info as opposed to taking people by their own word. I’d imagine that many “social media experts” may end up with the biggest keyword in their cloud being “douchebag”.

One of the additional aspects of Twitter Lists is that it now provides a new datapoint to help in the ways we can calculate influence and define users. I’m also a big fan of Favstar.fm and what they’re doing. Favorites would be another great datapoint to add to the mix but it doesn’t seem many people use it enough for it to be useful at the current time. I’m hoping that will change.

Initially the only measure of influence on Twitter was based on number of followers. It’s nice to see that as the service is maturing we are seeing features that offer better ways to help expose many other great people on the service. There are some services out there that are tackling this like Klout and Tweetrank. Yesterday Twitter announced the revamp of their controversial suggested user list. While not perfect it is a step in the right direction.

Woo Themes has added yet another Lifestreaming theme for Wordpress to their arsenal. This new one is called MyStream. Here’s a breakdown of its features:

A social profiles widgetized zone with custom widgets to display your Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, Flickr, etc, profiles in the sidebar.
7 Smashing MyStream-specific widgets, including the new Tabber widget, which allows you to move that stunning tabber anywhere in the sidebar.
Flexible 3 column layout with a variety of different widgetized spaces & layouts.
6 delicious colour schemes to choose from!
Last but not least, the brand new WooFramework2 with updated options panel

The theme offers short blog excerpts and links to 4 social media profiles in an about area. It also offers a stander aggregated Lifestream list but also supplements that with a widgetized photos & videos area in the sidebar. The theme costs $70 and you can get more details on it here and see a demo of the theme here.

Note there are many Lifestreaming themes available for Wordpress and I’ve provided a list of all of them here.

I saw today that they have now posted some of the dates and times for the interactive panels for this years’ SXSW conference. Of particular interest to me is a panel being run by new Googler Chris Messina on Activity Streams. He will be speaking on Saturday 3/13 at 9:30 am with location still unannounced.

If my experience as a SXSW newbie last year is any indication it will be a wee difficult climbing out of bed that early but for myself it will no doubt be worth it. I look forward to seeing many of you Lifestream Blog readers that day at Chris’ panel.

Here’s the details from the site:

From Facebook’s newsfeed to Twitter’s relentless real-time updates, the metaphor of the “stream” has taken social networking beyond blog posts and on to rich social activities. Learn about ActivityStrea.ms – the open format adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Windows Live – and how it’s fundamentally changing the social web.

You can view the details here and be sure to take the time to create your personal schedule and add this panel to it.