The annual pilgrimage to SXSW is upon us once again. Last year was my first time there and I had an amazing time. This year I feel a bit more prepared and plan to take full advantage of what I learned. If you’re new this year, or just want some good tips, ReadWriteWeb has created a handy list. There were plenty of complaints around coverage for iPhones but I’ve read that AT&T says their network will be ready this year. If that’s the case then you better make sure you’re prepared for the overtime usage your phone will be getting. I’ve purchased 2 iPhone 2200 mAh backup battery packs at Monoprice.com (sorry, can’t link to product page since site is down). These work great and are only $14 each. I recommend you seek a similar option for your mobile phone as well.

The SXSW website has created a nice personal scheduling section this year along with an iPhone app but I do still like the Sched.org version which offers some additional features as well as showing who else is attending panels and more. Also be sure to check out the new service by Sitby.us which aims to help you let your friends know which and exactly where you’ll be sitting at panels.

So there were 5 panels with some form of Lifestreaming proposed (one of which I was on) but unfortunately none of them got selected. Kind of a bummer since social media aggregation has really become such a dominating strategy for even the big players now. I still was able to look at the panels and find a few that are worthy of attending if you feel as letdown as I had.

Here are a few Lifestream related panels worth considering

• ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? – This appears to be a primer on what has become the leading Lifetreaming open standard adopted by many.
• Gmail: Behind the Scenes – Some of the engineers and product managers behind Google Buzz will be talking here.
• Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized? – Judging by some of the panelists there may be some Lifestreaming nuggets strewn across their talk.
• The Life Graph: You Are Your Location – While sounding like an LBS talk the description mentions what could be some interesting topics around Lifestream data.
• Time + Social + Location. What’s Next In Mobile Experiences? – Description a bit vague but may offer something interesting.
• Engines of Sociality: 2010 and Beyond – “…transformative technologies and paradigms on the horizon in 2010 that will power the new augmented sociality, including the social filtering, personalization, and contextualization of real-time messaging.” Could be interesting.
• Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web & Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends & also Search Patterns: Tangible Futures for Discovery – May offer some thoughts on Lifestream data and search.
• 2010: The Year We Broadcast Our Credit Card – Thoughts on Lifestreaming and privacy.

So as you can see there’s still a few topic based talks that should offer some insight into were Lifestreaming is today and where it may be going. Last year there was also an Activity Streams meetup at the end of one of the days and I’ve heard they’re planning another one. Also, I’ll be attending the Mashable party which is being sponsored by the very good Cliqset Lifestreaming service.

But I also know that many of these discussions will also occur in the hallways where I had many good ones last year. In fact last year I was glad to have met many great people including readers of this blog whom I talked to about Lifestreaming. I look forward to more of the same this year so if you happen to see me wandering around please say hello. You can check out my profile on the SXSW site or on Sched.org so that we can connect. You can also see many places I’ll be headed to on Plancast or better yet stalk me on FourSquare, Gowalla, or Brightkite along with Twitter.

It has become a very common trend to use Minority Report as a reference whenever referring to interactive visualization interfaces. I came across a video that takes this approach and applies it to Lifestreaming. As soon as I started to watch it I knew it looked familiar to me. That’s because I wrote about it a year ago. The video was created by the Vodafone Group’s user experience / concept development group.

click image to view on YouTube and select 1080p & expand the view for awesomeness

I decided to repost this not only because it’s a very cool video showing some unique interactive visualizations, but because it was reposted in glorious 1080p HD goodness on YouTube. I’m embedding it below for convenience but I recommend watching it on YouTube and making sure you select the 1080p option and expand its size. Just like when we see concept cars at auto shows, I’m wondering how far out these types of user interfaces are.

The FFundercats Podcast is a show run by FriendFeeders Josh Haley and Johnny Worthington where every week they discuss the service often with various users from FriendFeed as their guests. They’ll discuss the service itself but also delve into the users of the community and what interesting things they shared or discovered over the course of the week. It’s a great show because Johnny (an Aussie with attitude) and Josh (a kickass ukulele player) are cool people that don’t take the show too seriously and enjoying have fun on there. That’s exactly what I found when I joined them last week.

We started the show discussing the FriendFeed outage from the night before. Johnny took issue with MG Siegler’s post and joking stab during the outage. I personally didn’t pay much mind to it and didn’t get caught up in any drama. You can hear both my viewpoint and Johnny’s on this but lets just say that I try not to pay much attention or waste energy arguing the value of a service for myself because I’d much rather spend that time constructively with the users who have already embraced it.

We go on to a much funner and lighthearted topic after that…Olympic Curling. We discuss our collective excitement over its coverage and even take turns coming up with some pretty interesting and innovative ways that the sport could evolve into something much better funner to watch.

We talk about this and plenty more. You can stream it below or visit their site to download MP3 versions or subscribe to their podcast on iTunes.

I have seen several themes that take a slightly different approach to Lifestreaming where instead of simply providing a reverse chronological output of all the items from your stream, they segregate the output. I quite like this approach because many times if you post infrequently to some services they get lost quickly, never to be found again. With a segregation method you can highlight specific feeds regardless of the last time you published to them.

Aggregator provides this functionality and while it’s not a theme specifically designed for Lifestreaming, it can easily be adapted for it. It provides a display approach very similar to Alltop or Popurls. It’s powered by Simplepie so you know its feed handling is going to be solid. Lastly this is a free theme so it’s definitely worth checking out.

Here are some of the features it provides

• Widget based layout – add as many feeds as you want using one single widget again and again.
• Specify post count on each feed.
• While aggregating feeds for image / video site, you have an option to display the feeds as images or post titles.
• Aggregate feeds of any kind – blog posts, flickr images, video or audio
• On hover of the feed news titles, further snippet of the article is displayed
• 2 detailed colorschemes
• Drop-down menu
• Normal blog, single post and page layouts, comments are also well designed.

Also be sure to check out Livetwit which is another neat theme specifically built for a Twitter user or search results output.

via Aggregator – all your feeds at your website front. | Templatic.

I recently came across this page over at Moby Games for a PC game called Lifestream. It was a game created by Christopher M. Brendel and released in 2004 by Unimatrix Productions. According to its description page it was a 1st person adventure with detective / mystery elements, horror, and puzzle solving.

Here’s the full description

Father Randolph Holton, a Catholic priest, has disappeared. The son that no one knows about, John, goes to his father’s home to search for him. He soon learns that his father had become obsessed by something he called the Lifestream. To find his father he must also dive into the haunting, terrifying truths that seduced him. What on earth is the Lifestream and how could it have caused his father’s disappearance?

At first you play John in the present as he searches through his father’s notes and his house (inside and outside) to discover his whereabouts. As the game progresses, travel back in time to play Father Holton.

There are many adventure type puzzles to solve in this point-and-click game. You’ll find other characters to talk to and objects to find and use in this haunting adventure.

It sounds pretty interesting and I wouldn’t mind actually giving it a go. Too bad it’s so hard to find.