I came across this post tonight which would lead you to believe so. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Here’s an image from the patent filed:

Here’s a snip from the post at All Facebook

On Tuesday, Facebook was awarded a major patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”. This is a huge deal for a number of reasons, most significantly that it grants Facebook the opportunity to pursue other social networks which are infringing on their patent. Included in the patent are additional claims including feed filters, feed advertising, searching the feed, and more. (update We’ve been told that this is about the implicit feed stories. Will update when we have more info.)

via Facebook Patents The News Feed | All Facebook.

Update: there’s a much more detailed post on ReadWriteWeb here with a good discussion on it here. Thanks to Mahendra Palsule for the tip.

This is a series where I highlight some of the unique Lifestream sites that I come across. You can view previous galleries here. If you or someone you know has a unique custom Lifestream, be sure to let me know.

Site: Renaud Euvrard
Code: Custom

(click on Accueil for slideshow version)

Site: Tanner Moehle
Code: SweetCron

Site: Apollo Lemmon
Code: Custom

Site: Tom Watson
Code: Django / Custom

Site: Mark Tyrrell
Code: Custom

When I first started this blog in March of ‘07 there were only a handful of custom scripts that allowed you to aggregate your social services. Over the months thereafter a large number of services launched to do this for you. In November of ‘08 I wrote about how Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google were all slowly rolling out pieces to bring Lifestreaming to the mainstream. In Google’s case it was the creation of the user profile and the ability to link our social services to it. It was a small step towards their larger plan to enter the social streaming landscape.

Pulling data from multiple social services and having friends view and interact with it in one place has become an integral part of the web’s evolution. Google finally entered the social streaming space last week with the release of Buzz. With Google entering the market, it pretty much sends out the definitive statement acknowledging that social activity aggregation is here to stay.

I feel Google has closely watched the social aggregation phenomenon play out over the last few years whilst planning for a way to tap it, specifically as its become a critical data point for search. I’m sure I will write quite a bit about Buzz as time goes on but I wanted to focus a little on the decision to integrate it into Gmail.

Buzz could become a social destination and remove Gmail requirements in one simple step

I don’t think it was a good idea for Google to try and build a thriving social media platform strapped on to email. There are a couple of issues with this. Email is still a very important communication tool used primarily for business, private, or small group conversations. It’s a place where we can get work and other things done without the distraction of social media. Do we really need social media to invade our productivity tools? What’s next a sliding ticker of Twitter updates coming across a column on Excel?

Besides, another problem is that to participate in this social circle you need to be a Gmail user. That alone eliminates a huge number of existing users that don’t have accounts and adds additional overhead which I imagine will alienate many new users. Sure the majority of techies use Gmail as their webmail client but it’s still in 3rd place overall as a mail provider much smaller than Yahoo or Microsoft.

Speaking of Yahoo, most of my tech friends are Gmail users and yes I have an account there but Yahoo is my primary email service. Many probably don’t know it but Yahoo rolled out similar functionality to Buzz over a year ago. While they do offer a standalone version of their social service, they also decided to integrate with email. Yahoo’s interface to add services is a thing of beauty and their profile pages have matured very well with a clean design and great functionality. So Google has apparently taken a similar approach but didn’t pay attention to Yahoo’s much better refinements.

Yahoo’s email integration has been pretty unobtrusive for me and has never really interfered with my existing mail usage. Yahoo does a good job of relegating the social data to its own tab and never forced any of its functionality to invade my email. The only time I’ve seen them do something that did cross that boundary actually happened in a situation I thought was pretty cool.

Yahoo mail provides the latest updates from the services users have linked to their profiles on the sent email confirmation page now. I think that’s an innovative way to leverage a user’s activity stream. I liked their thinking here but think they need a simple option to remove this feature for those that want to opt out.

Forced Gmail integration with Buzz is something that many people (including myself) have not been happy about. Yahoo got it right by not requiring email integration to participate in their social service. You have the ability to view all of your friends activities from an “updates” tab on your profile page. I think this is a very important distinguishing factor and wish Google would offer the same thing. They could do this by also offering a separate activity tab from our Google profile pages. I think this would provide a giant step in the right direction for keeping Buzz separate from Gmail and building out profiles to become a social destination at the same time.

My profile & social activity as well as my friends is viewable separate from email on Yahoo

Besides forced Gmail intergration another problem we’ll see with Buzz is that it’s an aggregator which has proven to be a difficult sell to the mainstream. FriendFeed was a pioneer in this area and have created an amazing service to enjoy social streaming. Still they saw growth flatten and decided to sell to Facebook last year. Google has huge mindshare so it’s possible they could overcome mainstream penetration issues but the Gmail integration and what I feel has been a pretty poor user experience out of the gate isn’t a good start. I think more mainstream folks already happy with their current social network and in the current state of Buzz won’t be compelled enough to add yet another service. In the end a service is only as good as the number of friends you have participating on them.

As negative as I may sound about Buzz right now, I’m actually hoping they really improve it and will be rooting for them. For a non-beta release it seems very rushed and unpolished so I’m thinking they decided this product had to get out the door before they continue to lose traction in the social media landscape. As such I’m sure they will be allocating resources to continue trying to get it right. I will be an active user on the service and will continue to cover their developments for you here. You can connect with me on Google Buzz here.

Today I discovered that Laurent Eschenauer & Alard Weisscher, co-founders of the popular Storytlr Lifestreaming service, have embarked on a very ambitious new project. Storytlr ceased development and was released as open source last December and today we apparently find out why. They’ve now taken on a much larger problem of building a ” free, open, and decentralized social networking platform” called One Social Web.

Here’s their description

The purpose of onesocialweb is to enable free, open, and decentralized social applications on the web. Its protocol can be used to turn any XMPP server into a full fledged social network, participating in the onesocialweb federation. The suite of extensions covers all the usual social networking use cases such as user profiles, relationships, activity streams and third party applications. In addition, it provides support for fine grained access control, realtime notification and collaboration.

I read a little further to find out that this project is an initiative of Vodafone Group Research and Development which you can learn about more from the link. Laurent and Alard have also  stated that they are very much open to suggestion and feedback from anyone that wants to contribute to this project. My guess is that with their proven track record and the fact that this platform is being built around other open initiatives such as Activity Streams, portablecontacts, OAuth, OpenSocial, FOAF, XRDS, OpenID, and others, they should receive some good support.

Communicating across the disjointed social web is the problem One Social Web is trying to solve

When I think about how this system would work I look back at how SocialThing did things like where they would import activity from your friends from the sources of the social media services they lived on and allowed you to interact with them without requiring them to join SocialThing. I always liked that approach which nobody since then has tried to emulate and now it appears we have a new initiative aiming to bring us just that with open standards to boot.

On the day after Google announces Buzz and yet another social network we need to pay attention to I’m looking forward to watching the progress of One Social Web to create a decentralized and federated way of helping us connect the dots and make things easier to manage instead of adding to the pile.

They plan on the first release of the code to happen in March. You can learn much more about this project by visiting their site and viewing some of the materials I’ve embedded below.

Why One Social Web?

Screencast of Web Client

FOSDEM 2010 Presentation

If you haven’t heard of SimplePie let me tell you that it’s a great PHP library that can be used to do all kinds of things with RSS or Atom feeds. I have used it as a raw library as well as the core library for both Wordpress Plugins and Drupal Modules. It’s fairly simple to use, powerful and has good caching which is necessary when working with RSS feeds.

I came across this tutorial a while back and wanted to share it with you as it provides both a good tutorial for using SimplePie along with the application of building a Lifestream with it. If you’ve ever considered getting your feet wet with some simple PHP coding and think building a Lifestream from scratch to learn that, well you’ve found the right place for that.

Here’s the intro to the tutorial

In this tutorial we’ll build a page that gathers up the RSS feeds of all those little bits of your life and presents them all together in one spot. To do that, we’ll use SimplePie, a feed parsing class written in PHP. It’s powerful, it’s open source, and it’s easy to use. We’ll then hack on the output a little, and make it all look gorgeous with HTML and CSS. The techniques we’ll cover are also useful if you find that you need to aggregate RSS from many sources, like a news page.

via Build a Lifestream with SimplePie | Sitepoint.com.