The next day Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a post eluding to what Martin May had announced and providing some thoughts and details on what a universal checkin service might provide. Just 12 days later RWW writes about a website created for a new service called Check.in which emerges showing what Martin and his team have been working on.

Well Check.in has now been opened up for beta testing and several people have started to use it. MG Siegler wrote a post about it over at TechCrunch a few days ago exclaiming how it’s “potentially a brilliant remedy for checkin fatigue” which I totally agree with. You can go read MG’s post to get some more details and perspective on the service but I decided to record a video showing you the service in action.

As you can see it’s a nice simple way to checkin to Brightkite, Foursquare, and Gowalla. Not only do you avoid the need to run each app separately but you also save a ton of time because it bypasses redundancies and additional data being pulled from each of the services as well. After using it for several days I’m really enjoying the minimalist approach to simply checking in.

That being said, you will still need to load native apps in cases where you want to view some of the additional functionality from each of them such as viewing friends that may also be at the location, viewing trending areas near you, sharing or viewing photos from your venue, or any other unique features native to each service.

While Check.in currently supports the top gaming based LBS’s It will also be nice when they add support for others such as Loopt, Whrrl, Yelp and others. Moving forward it would also be great if features beyond the checkin get added to also take advantage of universal features across services such as being able to post a photo to multiple services or aggregate friends data to be displayed from multiple services within Check.in.

I look forward to watching this service evolve and continue to make the splintered hassle of participating across all of these services a lot more manageable.

So if you’re interesting in trying the service out the folks at Check.in have offered to provide 50 invites for readers of Lifestream Blog who retweet this post and follow the checkdotin account on Twitter so they can DM you the invite code.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Natuba is currently an invite only service that I was lucky enough to quickly get access to. The first thing I noticed when setting up my account is how elegant the interface was. I quickly added a few feeds and took a look at my page and it immediately reminded me of an older player in this space called Suprglu. The two aim to make your Lifestream page aesthetically pleasing with the ability to choose from pre-made templates and added ability to generate custom CSS for your page.

A handful of pre-determined common services are supported including Youtube, Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, and most of the blogging platforms available. You can also add your own RSS feeds as well. Once your page has been created there is a floating customization palette that you can use to edit the attributes of each individual item on your page. This service was definitely created with the designer in mind and it shows.

Although the homepage displays a cool live scrolling ticker of feed items as they are added, the site is geared more towards using it to provide an external URL to share your Lifestream with as opposed to having more social features with the ability to browse other users pages, add friends etc. This will be an interesting one to watch as it progresses to a full release.

I have several invites for you loyal Lifestream Blog readers so if you are interested you need to be a member of #Lifestream at Jaiku Channels and simply ask for one in the comments of this post.

Here’s my Natuba Lifestream

afeeda takes a very different approach in that it provides for various ways to aggregate feeds in a social manner by wrapping them into categories. They promote 3 specific categories which are Personal Feeds which is what you would use to create a Lifestream, Group Feeds to aggregate feeds around a certain topic, and Event Feeds to generate content around a specific conference or event. These 3 categories are just filtered labels which act as forced placeholders as the functionality for each of them is identical. They are just basically showing some top methods for using the functionality which is a good thing. Sometimes you have to spoon-feed technology to certain groups. You can also create as many aggregated feeds as you want for each of the categories.

One of the coolest things I found when setting up my account was the ability to import feeds from an OPML file…Yaaaay! Since I test and review so many services I happen to have one of these handy but as of yet had not been able to utilize it for any of the existing services but this was my lucky day. Definitely a feature for the geek crowd but I welcome it as my Lifestream continues to grow and it becomes time consuming to add all of my feeds to new and existing services. So in went my OPML file and out came all my feeds without any errors….(in my best Borat voice) Very Nice!

As you add feeds you can assign them labels which can then be used later to filter the output of the aggregated feed. They also offer a Bookmarklet to allow for adding sources to your feeds as you surf the web. One drawback is that it doesn’t archive the feed items. It just provides a real-time polled view as well as an aggregated feed which you can then add to your own feed reader. It also provides an OPML file export of the feeds used that make up the Lifestream. Another nice touch.

Overall I like some of the unique features provided here and the clean interface and speedy server responsiveness. The service is definitely worth a look.

Here’s my afeeda Lifestream

Here’s some tips on how to make a Lifestream useful by Phil Wilson

Steve Jay has provided some tips on creating a Lifestream where he utilizes a tool from The Blog Resource and you can view the finished product as his Lifestream here

Mike Gotta has a nice summary discussing the concepts and several tools on his post Analytics: The Unsung Hero Of Social Systems

Read/WriteWeb provided a preview of a new service that may be used as a Lifestreaming web application that is called Second Brain.

Kelly Abbott is the Sy Sperling of the web world. He isn’t just the co-founder of Dandelife but he’s also the most active member. He’s someone who is very passionate about his endeavor and is clearly someone who takes the voice of his community to heart. I was familiar with Dandelife prior to my adventure discovering the Lifestream concept. Lifecasting (the term used by Dandelife) is just a more organized form for collecting Life experiences in a structured package. So with some similarities as well as his active role in the web community, I wasn’t surprised to find a comment from Kelly at Jeremy’s original Lifestream post discussing plans to add similar functionality to Dandelife. Well that was November 8th of last year and he has just recently announced details regarding what’s coming and man does it look good.

The new functionality called “Dandelife Streams” brings true Lifestreaming functionality to the site. You are provided a new setup screen where you can add feeds by providing account details for several pre-configured sites including Flickr, Youtube, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Last.fm, & Twitter. You can also manually add feeds as well. One added distinction for the manually added feeds is the ability to flag them as either “headline” or “personal”. Personal would be for more personally generated content from sites that aren’t pre-configured such as alternatives to the pre-configured ones such as Jaiku, Vimeo, Librarything, etc. Headlines could be used to pull current events from a news feed or other source. And lastly if you have a Twitter account you can configure Dandelife to create a Tweet every time you add a new story.

Once completing your configuration you will have your most recent streams displayed on your home page and there is a new navigation ribbon added below the current one specifically for the streams. By clicking on the “My streams” button you get a familiar aggregate view of all the streams by day and then sorted by feed type. You also have the ability to filter by specific streams by clicking on the appropriate link from the navigation bar.

The distinction here is that while the original “story” functionality requires active creation of content, the streams will be passively pulling in your activity from the sites you configure. The clever way in which they bridge the streams to the foreground (and I imagine consequently added to the timeline) is by allowing a user to click on any of the content imported and then actively create a story for it.

All of this new functionality will be a great addition for existing users and should definitely attract many new ones. To say I’m excited about the possibilities with this new functionality being added is an understatement. 2007 appears to be a breakout year for Lifestreaming with additional sites like Jaiku, Tumblr, and more on the horizon. As they begin to enter the web mainstream, Dandelife could be a site leading the charge. I’m just hoping that beyond the minor evolution of their stream implementation, they develop ways to revolutionize it.

Resources

• Dandelife Demo – Videos demonstrating use of Dandelife
• Lifecasting – Dandelife Streams – Preview and screencast from Dandelife
• Life Online. Living the Dream – Very inspiring post from Kelly on Dandelife
• Brand your life story with Dandelife – TechCrunch story on Dandelife