Today I was alerted by FranK Gruber of a new service created to backup your Lifestream. The site is available at the very starightforward and appropriately named Lifestreambackup.com and they are currently taking names for those interested when they launch.

From the site:

Each year more of your life is stored online. While many services will back up your desktop, we haven’t found anything that will backup your lifestream. So we are building it. In a couple of weeks, we will launch with the ability to manage all of your online accounts in one place. You enter your credentials once per site, set it for daily or weekly backup, and then we do the rest

image courtesy of Flickr user alexmuse

Frank did an interview with one of the founders. During the video they discuss some of the concepts at a high level. The service appears to act as an interface and conduit to get the data you create on an initial set of supported web services (Flickr, Blog via RSS, Google Docs, Twitter, Youtbue, and Facebook initially) to an Amazon S3 account. They exclaim that “If it has an API that allows us to pull data, we are happy to back it up for you”. They also offer the ability to link to your own S3 account if you already have one to save on the $6.95 per 10Gb monthly charge.

Other than that there aren’t any more details. I’m very curious as to how the service will work. I’m wondering what the UI and configuration options will look like. I’m also curious as to what actual data will be stored and what the associated formats will be. In any case this sounds like a geat idea and beyond being useful as a backup it can also be a great archive. If an interface can get written to pull, display and search the data as well it could become very useful. Also with recent announcements from Google about closing down services and no doubt more of this trend to occur in the future, creating backups seems like a very important proposition. I’m looking forward to its release so I can try it out.

Here is the video Frank created:

Dirk Olbertz notified me about a preview to the new version of NoseRub at their blog today. For those of you not familiar with NoseRub it’s basically an open source protocol/application written in PHP/MySQL that allows you to create a distributed social network using open standards like OpenID, RSS and FOAF. It is also the platform used to power the Identoo.com Lifestreaming service.

The feature being touted in this new version is the ability to add any url as a contact. From what I can tell, this allows you to add the url of let’s say a friend’s blog and it will then be able to parse all the microformat information available from that site (specifically hCard & XFN data) and then add the streams of data from discovered services automatically creating a Lifestream for them. I’m not positive, but I think that’s what’s going on. It also appears to support adding the url from a user of FriendFeed as well.

Here’s a blurb:

But what really important is, that this is a real distributed social network! And your contacts do not even need to know what NoseRub is. Just add them as your contacts and be able to follow their activities from that moment on. And if you want to, you just install NoseRub on your own server and no one but you has full control over your social network.

You can read the rest on their blog.

It’s nice to see this step towards a truly open framework leveraging open standards. As we see DiSO and DataPortability evolve I’m sure we are going to see more powerful features adopted by sites and services.

I’ve been chatting it up a bit lately with Matt Galligan who is one of the founders of Socialthing! which is a new Lifestreaming service that is currently in private beta. One of their distinguishing features is the ability to use the service as a dashboard to publish to other services. I’ll provide more details about them in an upcoming post, but today Matt sent me a sweet photo showing off their service running on an iPhone.

Photo courtesy of Matt Galligan

That is one sexy looking iPhone app if I may say so myself. You can keep up with the progress of Socialthing on their blog

I read over at TechCrunch about a new Lifestreaming service called Iminta that just went into private beta. This one was started by some former Cnet’er. Leaving high profile dotcoms to start Lifestreaming services may be a new trend. If you remember it was a group of former Googlers that started FriendFeed as well.

Iminta first appears like any other Web 2.0 obscure domain name, when in fact it’s slang for “I’m Into”. That toungue in cheek attitude makes way to other areas into the site where they use the “inta” verb as a title for other areas of the site. I was able to get an invite and have played with the service a little. My initial impression is that this is a worthy entrant into the ever growing Lifestreaming service forest. Setup was very quick and simple, the site has a very nice layout, and they have defitely put a lot of time into looking at the Lifestreaming space and providing very useful features to place them near the top of the list.

I’ll play around some more and hopefully have a full review up soon. In the meantime you can check out a screencast that demonstrates Iminta, along with several other stories on the web about Iminta below and if you are interested in an invite leave a comment below as I may have a few to hand out.

• Wired.com – Iminta.com Offers ‘One Ring’ for Your Online Life
• Webware.com – Your privacy is variable: Iminta gets it

User Tommaso on #Lifestream let me know about an interesting project called Socialstream. It was the result of a Google-sponsored capstone project in the Master’s program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. It was initially planned as a way to improve Orkut which is Google’s home grown social network but it went beyond just simple funtionality changes and UI improvements.

Here’s a snip of the Lifestream task they were trying to accomplish:

Aggregated Social Content – Presenting all of a person’s social content in a single site makes it easier for users to keep up-to-date with their contacts by making the process of finding information takes less effort and time. With Socialstream, users no longer have to jump from site to site just to see if or what their contacts have been up to, since all information is easily accessible from a single location.

After reading through the project pages this looks to be a very well thought out and impressive looking service. It appears to really be striving to not only allow users to create Lifestreams, but adds functionality to create a social network based on them for all users within to share their presence with each other. Im really looking forward to this one and hope that it becomes available to us at some point soon.

This project illuminated my realization that one thing I’m starting to notice. As we get flooded with more Lifestreaming services there is a need for one of them to gain dominance if a social network is to be built around them. For many of us, not only do we want a full featured Lifestream with all our aggregated services, but we want all our friends’ Lifestreams to be just as easily accessible on that same service. The same issues that prompted the Lifestream concept to be created in the first place, will repeat if such a service doesn’t emerge.

A similar situation is starting to happen with the battle for micro-blogging services. Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce are now in a duel to see who will become king. Having a winner is pretty important as following your friends and posting to all 3 services is cumbersome. Although similar, for me, the use of any one of these is just a service component that make up my Lifestream definition. If you follow my Lifestream, it doesn’t matter which one of them I use and vice versa if I monitor your Lifestream. For now, I primarily use Twitter and feed that content into Jaiku. That’s the beauty of Lifestreams, you can choose any services within specific areas to make one up.