The other day I saw Chris Prillo sent out a message announcing that he was launching Lockergnome.net as a free Wordpress blog / Lifestream Archive. Of course I quickly had to go see what Chris was up to here. Here’s a post where Chris explains why you should sign up for the service.

After visiting the site I realized that Chris was using BuddyPress to power it. Buddypress is a way to add a social network layer on top of Wordpress MU. I then started to test the site out and later saw that Chris had left me a message on it. I asked him about the motivation for creating the service which he responded to in a follow up post where he stated the following:

Been wanting to try BuddyPress for quite some time.

Been wanting to host WordPress blogs for quite some time.

Been wanting to help people archive their Social Media Lifestream data in a non-proprietary, fully exportable system for quite some time.

Ok fair enough, I can dig those reasons. So with BuddyPress, users can sign up and create their own blogs on the service utilizing Wordpress. To enable the Lifestreaming functionality, every blog has an install of the very popular WP Lifestream plugin. Also, they’ve setup the microblog inspired P2 theme as the default and only selection available with the free service. Premium accounts are available for $12.77 a month and powered by Page.ly which presumably will allow you to gain complete control over the blog as you would have from a standard self-hosted deployment allowing tweaks and installation of additional plugins and themes.

click image to see Lifestream settings page

When I first heard about the release of BuddyPress I quickly thought about how this could be used as a tool to create your own private Lifestreaming community which is exactly what he’s done here. Unfortunately the actual Lifestream activity itself seems to be relegated to the individual user blogs themselves and doesn’t appear on the home page under the “Site Wide Activity” which I think would be a nicer implementation that would expose user activity to the whole community. As it stands that section displays blog posts by users, wire posts (think Facebook Wall posts), and inter-network activity such as friending notifications. I’d really like to see the Lifestreaming activity integrated more.

Chris has created a pretty geeky and tech-centric community and connecting with that crowd on its own merit is a worthy reason for joining the service. Besides that you can also join to play around with a live BuddyPress implementation. Lastly, if you’ve heard about the WP Lifestream and always wanted to play with it but either don’t have a Wordpress site or didn’t yet feel comfortable installing it, you can now test it easily for free. Just remember you need to create a blog after you sign up to get access to Wordpress and the plugin.

Finally if you’re interested in setting up your own multi-user Lifestreaming community I’ve compiled a list of several options that are available besides BuddyPress. I’ll continue to watch the community on Lockergnome and you can connect with me here if you decide to try it out.

Update 1/15

Added screencast of the service

Sometimes it’s a simple idea along with an equally simple execution that creates a great user value as a web service. That’s exactly you have in a newly released service called Formspring. You create a profile in a minute and then it allows users to ask you questions that you can selectively choose to answer and display publicly. Yes a simple concept and execution but it’s awesome.

I found out about it yesterday after seeing friends Drew Olanoff and Derrick Jefferson send out tweets about the service. I have to think that the inspiration for this may have come from the Facebook phenomenon where people shared 25 random things about themselves. The difference is that for those of us that participated in that little experiment (myself included) we selectively chose those things. Formspring offers a simple interface to let others choose the questions, even anonymously. Then the user can decide which ones to answer and display publicly.

Here’s a video explaining the service in under a minute

Other features the site offers are some simple design backgrounds you can use or upload an image of your own. A widget you can place wherever you want to accept questions from anywhere. And from a Lifestreaming syndication perspective you can choose to link your Formspring account to Tumblr, Twitter, Blogger or Facebook. Unfortunately an RSS feed isn’t available which would allow more flexible sharing for a Lifestream. Another interesting design choice is that you can follow people but they don’t display that information for anyone to see. While doing that on other services that encourage ego boosting by gaining large numbers of followers might make sense, I don’t see that issue here and unfortunately it backfires as I find follower lists a useful way to discover new people.

Overall this is a great idea which I’m sure will offer us even more insight into the lives of our friends in the form of truth or dare…without the dare to those of us willing to play.

Go ahead…ask me anything

This is a 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.

For the past couple weeks I’ve been trying out a news lifestreaming service called Nebul.us (currently in private beta).  Nebul.us offering is an easy way to share online content with friends based on your browsing history. By tracking your online activity, Nebul.us  will show your friends the information you single out and provides a very simple hub for posting information.

Behind Nebul.us is a Firefox plugin (Safari and Internet Explorer plugins coming soon) that tracks your online activity. The plugin will share this information with Nebul.us where then you can move into Nebul.us and choose which of these you’d like to make public. Yeah, that’s right. It logs all your browsing history and delivers it to Nebul.us…more on that later. Another way of sharing is setting up sites for Nebul.us to monitor like Last.fm, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, RSS, etc.

The Skinny

Nebul.us is beautiful. It displays the content you share in a beautiful graphical “cloud”. Information is shown around a central piece with status updates, videos, articles, etc. shown around it. Nebul.us separates the categories to share into 5 categories: Articles, Music, Photos, Updates, and Videos. The cloud allows friends a simple and elegant way to view what other people are sharing by placing each item in easily identifiable flags and usage bars. The flags identify simple updates (status updates, specifically shared articles, etc.) and the bars show length of time. Whether it is length of time spent on a specific website or length of a song.

image courtesy of useallfive.com *

Nebul.us is an interesting concept. Sort of a merge between a Wakoopa for websites and Pownce for sharing. It can monitor your web usage and share that information if you let it. And it makes sharing updates, videos, links, and music very easy.

Wait, it Monitors What?

Like I said, the Nebul.us shoots your everywhere you browse to the Nebul.us private history. This isn’t automatically shared, but it is visible. I found some items like my bank site usage, email usage, and my cable provider’s account. This is a bit scary out of the box. Another key thing is that in my testing I found that Nebul.us still logs all the sites I visited while using Firefox’s Private Browsing. This I think is unacceptable from the plugin, or should be identified as such out of the box.

You can setup blocked sites for Nebul.us. Going into the settings and telling the plugin which sites to ignore is doable, but it requires the user to be proactive in blocking. Making sites trusted is also required in the settings, which is how it should be. I don’t know how Nebul.us can correct for these issues moving forward, but it is a bit complicated to handle. I may be in the minority these days when it comes to privacy, but this steps a little beyond my comfort zone.

I like Nebul.us in concept, but I have to admit I can’t see myself using it regularly. I also have a feeling it will not receive wide usage due to the fact that it doesn’t just work out of the box. I’ve never been a big fan of sites that require browser plugins. StumbleUpon was the one site that proved browser plugin sites could work, but times have changed and so has StumbleUpon (which has a toolbar that don’t require a browser plugin anymore). And in this age of Twitter, things as complicated as installing a plugin, setting up trusted sites, remembering all of your blocked sites, then handling the sharing; I cannot see Nebul.us gaining much traction. Which is a shame because like I said it’s beautiful and fun to look at. If I were to give any advice to Nebul.us it’d be, drop the plugin and expand your monitored site selection. Then use a bookmarklet for easy sharing beyond what’s monitored. At the very least, drop the browser history monitoring and have every site be blacklisted unless explicitly selected as trusted. (Ok, I’ll step off my soapbox now.)

I have 15 invites for anyone that wants to check it out. Let me know in the comments.

* image from useallfive.com because their image is better than anything I could screen grab

Last night I discovered a new service called Flavors.me that can be used to quickly create a beautiful Lifestream. The service was clearly built focused with simplicity and design in mind. Setting up an account takes minutes since all you provide is your name, email, and an about paragraph followed by the services you want to link to your account.

The choice of services is limited at this time with only Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, Last.fm, Facebook, Goodreads, Netflix, and RSS feeds currently available. Once you’ve added a service you have the ability to choose which items get imported into your stream. For instance with Last.fm you can choose whether to display recent tracks, top artists, top tracks, and user info by selecting each item individually with checkboxes.

After you’ve provided your site info and added you’re services you can move on to the design. Flavors.me provides a very  nice floating design panel that allows you to edit the layout, background, fonts and color scheme. You can also upload a background image to use. I found using this panel to be really nice and unique tool.

They currently offer 3 different layouts that each offer differing display functionality so be sure to try each of them out. If you upload an image you can control the placement a bit. The fonts selection and sizing with realtime preview is sweet and there’s a predefined set of color schemes with the ability to edit the palette.

The display of the services is one of the unique aspects of Flavors.me. Instead of your standard feed with text and thumbnails they offer some nice visuals for the data imported from your services based on the items you chose to import. Flickr offers a nice large image with thumbnails to navigate and display them while staying on the site. You can also select personal photos or favorites from a dropdown menu. Each of the services offer nice visuals and navigation options that are uniquely different.

After playing around with the service, Flavors.me is very impressive and shows a ton of promise especially considering it’s currently in its alpha testing phase. I really enjoyed the UI, design and features. I think it offers some uniqueness I haven’t seen in similar services out there. I want to see support for more services which will hopefully come soon. I really look forward to watching them progress.

I highly recommend giving them a try. You can use the invite code “lifestreamblog” to sign up and try the service right now. You can find my page here.

If you’re still not sold you can watch their service overview video below.

Today I came across an interesting development project called 3D Lifestream created by Nick Selvaggio. Nick is the author of the Lifestream module for Drupal that exposes Lifestream data created by the Activity Stream module and provides an interface for Flash/Flex apps.

So Nick took his Lifestream data from Drupal and using his module connected it to the Papervision library which is a toolkit for creating 3D objects and animation in Flash. He provides some details on how he went about creating this mashup and provides a download of the .fla file used to create the .swf. so that anyone else interested can get a jumpstart on creating their own version.

I played with his demo (screencast below) a bit which wasn’t too exciting since it was only Tweets and Delicious links which actually didn’t link out for me. It would have been nice to see photos or videos but overall it’s demo of the concept that matters here which pretty cool and could be used for some interesting 3D visualization that include multiple users streams or other rich 3D content as well.

I recorded a quick little screencast to show this to you