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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Life Collage is a new Lifesteaming theme for Wordpress that is actually a child theme built on the Hybrid framework. What is a Wordpress theme framework you ask? Well these are Themes built with flexibility in mind, designed so that you can tweak them to fit your needs. This can usually be done in a way that doesn’t modify the core theme, so that upgrading later doesn’t become a problem. They also often offer a theme settings page that allow for many options to be set in an easy way without having to dig into the code. If you want to learn more or try a theme framework, I came across this great post titled 20 Wordpress Theme Frameworks and Starting Resources.

So I started by first downloading the required Hybrid theme framework and installed it. I recommend that you activate this theme and then go through the settings page to configure it the way you want. Then you can move on to downloading and installing the Life Collage theme. Once installed you can create your Lifestream by adding a new page and then selecting the included Lifestream template from the dropdown as opposed to the default template.

The template will provide a center column that displays short versions of your blog posts. Under that it will then display a ribbon of images courtesy of the FlickrRSS plugin. The Hybrid framework provides many custom widgets and the Life Collage theme adds a custom Lifestream widget that allows you to add as many external RSS feeds to be displayed in a two column format under the ribbon of images imported from Flickr.

So that’s about all this theme has to offer at this point but it is version 0.1 so perhaps we will see more features added to take advantage of the framework already in place.

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A while ago I watched a video interview Robert Scoble did with the folks at Small Worlds. This is a new virtual world service that is being compared to Second Life. The difference here though is that it doesn’t require you to download a client and runs right within your browser.  They’ve also managed to create a very simple environment to navigate and interact with compared to many of the other services available.

So why am I writing about this? Well because they have tied in aspects of Lifestreaming in a whole new way that hasn’t been done by anyone else. This virtual world, like most others, has many of the familiar elements such as avatars, homes, and objects you can buy and put in your home. The difference here being that you can tie in social media services to your virtual objects.

Here is an image showing my home and several virtual objects with the associated services that are tied to them.

If you join Small Worlds, you can visit me here

Here are some details about the objects you see in my virtual world above

• The stereo is powered by my playlists at Last.fm
• The Plasma is powered by searches or playlists I create on YouTube
• The mural is powered by images I define from Flickr
• The painting is powered by my tweets from Twitter

But it’s very hard to demonstrate how innovative this service is in a static blog post with images so I’ve created a detailed screencast demonstrating these features for you below.

My Lifestreaming functionality demo in Small Worlds

Note that I uploaded this video in HD quality which is better viewed directly on YouTube here

As you can see this truly does offer a very new innovative way to share your Lifestream. It may not be the quickest or most streamlined way to do it, but definitely the coolest. Time will tell how this functionality plays out on Small Worlds but keep in mind this is just one small aspect of the service. There is a whole lot more going on here including games, missions, and plenty more that make this a must try for anyone interested in virtual worlds. They’ve even created an API that should provide some very interesting extensions for 3rd party developers.

One thing to keep in mind is the fact that the service is free to join and you need to earn gold to buy objects for your apartment. This can be done several ways including completing missions as well as purchasing with real world money.

It would be very cool and interesting to experiment using this with several other users in the room with me. Perhaps I can get a few of you guys to join and help me test that. If you create an account on the service leave a comment with your user details below. Perhaps I can schedule a time to invite you over for a virtual world meetup at my apartment.

Some additional resources to check out

• You can see the video interview Robert did here
• Information and review from BBGsite.com
• Review from TechPluto

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This is the first guest post from reader Trae Blain. You can visit his site at traeblain.com. If you are interested in writing a guest post, just head on over to the contact page

In a sea of lifestreaming services, UnHub tries to distinguish itself from the other services by offer a simple portal into your online life. UnHub is a brand new player to the lifestreaming market that started out of inspiration from the Skittle’s brand experiment that used social media websites as its primary website.

The Gist

Unlike other lifestreaming services out there that aggregate your data into one common place, UnHub simply adds an iframe bar above all your online services with links that point to the services you add. Anyone can create an account—for anybody. Here’s Barack Obama’s UnHub as well as My (Trae Blain) UnHub. The service is extremely lightweight since it does not actually grab any of your data, but merely points people to the location of that data.

TechCrunch points out that this is a great tool for businesses that participate in social media, as illustrated in this Josie’s Restaurant Unhub. Personal and business use will also be fond of the simple analytics feature that is included with the service to see what links are clicked and what links nobody cares about.

In Practice

Usage is fairly easy. It asks you what services you use and what are the links to the profiles for those services. UnHub appears to support a large number of services (which would be expected with a service with such little overhead), 57 in fact. After creating an account you are asked for an email and password to associate with the account which allows you to view the Analytics feature. Each UnHub address requires a landing page to start with, and can easily be selected with the Home check box.

UnHub also allows for the selection of websites outside of the supported 57, although those sites won’t include a favicon in the top bar. UnHub is a nice service that can be leveraged by people/companies that want to use something like Twitter searches or any number of personal sites for their UnHub group.

Not all Peachy

UnHub does have its set of issues. Due to Twitters setup, UnHub does not work directly with it. Instead it substitutes Tweetree for Twitter updates profile viewing. Tweetree has a nice interface, but it’s not Twitter and could turn heavy Twitter users off to its use. Also, there’s no way to style your UnHub Bar. My UnHub uses a meager 15 services (only 26% of the ones offered) and the bar tends to push the other service’s content under the crease, Especially on low resolution monitors. Also, adding new services can be a chore. The “supported” services do not simply ask for your username and then it finds the appropriate link, the actual url must be entered into the form. Remembering some of these and tracking them down can sometimes be a pain. Also after the initial setup, you can only add one service at a time. It would be much easier to add multiple links before having to save the page.

To Sum it Up

UnHub offers a nice service that I believe many people would prefer in things like email signatures. UnHub provides the benefit of sending people directly to the content’s location (save Twitter), instead of aggregating it all into one place. It is a different approach to lifestreaming that some will find preferable over other methods commonly used today.

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I saw over at Woo Themes that they have recently released the Irresistible premium Wordpress theme for FREE. This theme took 4th place of the top 10 themes selected from a contest that Woo Themes ran last year. The designer, Izuddin Helmi also won 1st place with another submission.

This theme caught my eye very quickly as it is both styled and has functionality specifically catered to a Lifestreamer. I thought this theme looked so great that I had to try it out and write a review.

Before I get into the details take a look at the screenshot of the theme below after I installed it and plugged in all my data.

Click for a cleaner image

Not sure you feel the same way I do, but this theme struck me immediately as being really nice visually and breaking out the content in a unique way that I really hadn’t seen before. I feel it’s a clean fresh look that works well to bring your Lifestream to a blog. The image above shows the custom homepage option which provides small excerpts from blog posts and includes the Lifestreaming components. There is also another traditional homepage you can set it to use that displays full posts with images and utilizes a standard single sidebar on the right.

So now I’ll get into the setup and options. After copying over the theme and selecting it you have several things you need to configure to get your homepage and content setup properly. There is a dedicated options page to make this a pretty simple process. The myPhotos section is pulled in by providing your Flickr user account information. Flickr appears to be the only service supported for this section. myLifestream requires that you install and configure the great Lifestream Wordpress plugin by David Cramer available here. You have the ability to set the number of items you want displayed on the homepage for blog posts, photos, and Lifestream items. The myVideos section has a unique way of pulling in your latest videos. Simply create a new post and copy the embed code into a custom field that is added by the theme and then simply use the tag video which sets a flag for it to be placed on the homepage. Unlike photos, you don’t have to define a specific service and it appears to support many different video services.

So beyond all the Lifestreaming options I just pointed out, there are some other great features included in the theme options:

• There is support for 9 different color schemes all controlled via a dropdown that simply selects a different CSS file to use. The colors include blue, brown, gray, green, pink, purple, red, teal, and yellow
• You have a dedicated field to create an about section which appears on the home page with a link to read more on a dedicated page
• You can use a custom logo
• You can provide the code for your Google Analytics and Feedburner accounts
• A section for placing ad or other banners on your site
• A sidebar widget that pulls in latest posts and comments and displays a tag cloud
• …and several other options to tweak the theme

3 of the 9 total color schemes available

As if that wasn’t enough you also get the full PSD file that has an extensive breakdown of all elements used so you can customize the design even further if you wish to. I have to say that this is the most impressive Lifestreaming theme I have seen or Wordpress yet and I’m tempted to use it for my personal site despite the fact I just spent a ton of time customizing another one I switched to recently. I highly recommend taking a look and tinkering with this theme to see if it may be right for you.

You can get all the details and download the Irresistible theme on the Woo Themes site here and get a live demo here.

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