One of the features I’ve always wanted from a Lifestream is a calendar feature. What I’d like to see would be a standard calendar UI to be able to navigate and drill down through a Lifestream. This would offer the ability to easily find dates and ranges that I’d want to look for. This would be good for finding trips, birthdays, or to see what we documented for other milestones that occur in our lives.

So I decided to do a quick mockup of what this feature might look like if it was built for FriendFeed. I borrowed the Google calendar and then just dropped in some ways that you could navigate through it. I chose the full month view which would primarily offer text links, but perhaps the weekly view could offer some nice thumbnail visualizations of data.

My mockup of a possible FriendFeed Calendar UI

Sure there are great timeline based Lifestreaming services such as Dipity, Lifeblob, Allofme, but they don’t offer the standard UI I’m looking for. Now defunct service Swurl had a somewhat nice Calendar view but I’d want more from one than they offered. My custom Lifestream built using Life2front offers another interesting timeline view, but once again not a standard calendar UI. Hopefully this feature will be either added by FriendFeed or another service soon as I think many would really appreciate the calendar metaphor for navigation.

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Today I was reading the latest issue of Wired. In it is an interview with Salon Cofounder Scott Rosenberg about his new book Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters.

Rosenberg’s book researched the origins of blogging and goes on to discuss how it has become a phenomenon. Wired asks him several questions which include why did he need to write a book when a blog post would do which could have been followed with a rimshot. Other questions include whether he believes blogs have peaked, what impact Twitter has had, and what does he see the future of blogging becoming.

It is this last question that piqued my interest. Here’s the excerpt:

Wired: So what will blogging look like in 2019?

Rosenberg: The interesting outgrowth will be lifecasting. With traditional blogs, even if it’s easier to put stuff into a blog, you’re still selecting items. Lifecasting is an alternative where you’re pressing a button and recording everything.

Rosenberg uses the term Lifecasting which more often is used to describe broadcasting personal video but many people interchange the term Lifecasting and Lifestreaming and I’m gonna say he meant more than just video with his statement.

You can read the whole interview here.

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At the end of last week, Steve Rubel (a popular PR blogger) made big waves when he announced that he was replacing his blog with a Lifestream. Steve is just the latest convert to come to this decision. There has been a  long line of folks proclaiming that the blog is dying in favor of the Lifestream. In my end of year roundup for 2008 I highlighted several of those that were predicting the transiton. This included ReadWriteWeb, Wired, and Yongfook who is the author of the popular SweetCron Lifestreaming software.

Lets get this out of the way quickly. While I may be one of the biggest Lifestreaming evangelists cheerleaders out there, I still would never consider killing my blog in favor of Lifestreaming. My initial love affair with Lifestreaming was due to the efficiency and elegance of providing content I created using multiple external web services. But for the most part I have a Lifestream to share a rich online diary that I can also use to reflect upon my past. But my Lifestreaming is only one method for how I want to tell stories whereas blogging provides a different one.

So why are many replacing their blogs with Lifestreaming? I think prior to the advent of Lifestraming and its tools many people created blogs with the sole purpose of providing a diary. In this case, I think it makes total sense to make the swtich. But this is only a portion of the blogging population. So what else is fueling this movement? I believe its a combination of several factors that are either individually or combined making it compelling.

Here’s a few:

• Lifestreaming tools and services have gotten very good
• Mobile apps provide great functionality for creating and posting Lifestreaming content
• The popularity of Twitter and other micro blogging services have consumed folks
• Facebook has turned into a Lifestreaming platform
• The advent of the real-time web has transformed user behavior (being quick and first has become more important than anything)
• Quanity has appeared to have trumped quality (volume! volume! volume!)
• People are embracing the lazy web

It appears that Steve’s conversion has really struck a chord and possibly become a wake up call for many folks. Robert Scoble who has been continously harassed about spending too much time using Twitter and FriendFeed and having neglected his long form went in the opposite direction stating his need to return to blogging. Louis Gray wrote a post stating that your blog is the foundation of all your activity which I fully agree with. I’ve had krynsky.com since 1998 and it will probably continue to be my main hub forever. Jeremiah Owyang also provided some good insight into Steve’s move along with the details of the ribbing he gave Scoble.

I read many more reactions out there on Steve’s announcement, but of all the banter I found, my favorite commentary came from Stuart Foster. He wrote a nice piece of which I fully agree with the following:

I’m not discounting any medium of communication. I’m merely urging those with interesting thoughts not to limit themselves to a more concise medium. Lifestreams are a great supplement to your blog and other long form thoughts. They should not be a replacement.

You can read some more of Steve’s subsequent posts on his switch to Lifestreaming which include:

• Frequently Asked Questions About This Lifestream
• A Lifestreaming Workflow
• Why Lifestream? To Model Leonardo Da Vinci

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Today I discovered a new and very different search engine. Spezify is a new search tool which presents its results using beautiful visual boxes from content it discovers based on search engine results and rich media sites like Flickr, YouTube where it scours to get imagery and even finds ways to present textual content in a pretty fashion. If I had to provide a quick description that many of you would understand it would be if Google married SweetCron and this was their spawn.

Just like any new search tool the first thing you are mandated to do is a vanity search. So when I searched for my name I quickly realized that the results could easily pass as a Lifestream for me. The results included recent Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Tweets, profile descriptions and more. Now I know this may not be the case for everyone, especially depending on how common your name and its associated results may be, however I found it to be very cool in my case and think it’s worthy of trying for yourself as well.

Beyond being able to use it as a Lifestreaming search engine, you can create really nice visual / informational pages on any topic or entity. Below are several examples to demonstrate this including The Smiths, X PRIZE Foundation (my employer), and Hamburger (my other true love).

After you receive the results page you can click and hold your mouse to scroll up and down as well as left and right to reveal more results dynamically as you scroll. This got me thinking that if these guys partnered up with the folks at Cooliris to provide a 3D visual interface that I might never leave my house. You also have an options page where you can choose whether to include results from various search engines and web services, filter results to include images, video, text, or all of them, or provide “safe” search results. Lastly they also generated related key words based on your search which you can then click on to view their results.

(options page)

Here’s a snip from the Spezify site with their description of the service:

We take web search further, away from endless lists of blue text links and towards a more intuitive experience. We want you to get a good overview of a subject, find useful information and be inspired with Spezify. We collect websites and are aiming to use as many relevant, free and open API:s as possible to generate extensive and diverse search results.

Spezify also reminded me of another nice visual search engine called Viewzi that you should also check out. When I went there tonight to take a look they seemed to have added quite a few more features and have progressed quite nicely since the last time I visited the site.

(my Viewzi results)

We are a visual culture and the nice mix of images, video, and text is a new interface paradigm that is becoming more and more common and seems to really be striking a chord with web  users. I really look forward to watching Spezify evolve and include a larger group of services in their results as they plug into more API’s in the future.

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Yesterday I came across the Lifestream page of  Taddeo Zacchini who is a graphic designer for Squarespace where he states in the header

This is my lifestream page: a new feature that will soon be available to all Squarespace users. The whole world of social network in one place, completely customizable in all parts!

Taddeo isn’t the only only one that has been bitten by the Lifestreaming bug. Squarespace staffers Tyler Thompson and Eric Anderson have also created Lifestream pages (see below). I recently spotlighted Squarespace in one of my custom Lifestream galleries for a page they created where they aggregate the Twitter streams of several staff members (note they mention the new functionality coming on this page as well). They have also created a similar page for the staff of Revision3.

The only details I’ve been able to uncover regarding the new functionality they will be rolling out is from this post on Stephan Wetzl’s blog where he states

Squarespace will make soon a big update on V5 with releasing social widgets that let you aggregate data from across your various social networks completely within the Squarespace environment. This widgets let you create amazing Lifestream sites, so that your blog or website transforms to your personal social media hub.

When I first looked at how the Squarespace admin UI functioned I was pretty amazed. They also offer the ability to import data from existing blog platforms which include Wordpress, TypePad, Blogger and Movable Type allowing for a total transition. So with their upcoming functionality to create beautiful Lifestream designs, they should become a worthy new platform for anyone interested in creating a unique and custom Lifestream.

I’ll keep you posted on the release and will provide a full review once it becomes available.

Taddeo Zacchini Lifestream

Tyler Thompson Lifestream

Eric Anderson Lifestream

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