A social magazine app is defined by providing the ability to connect and import content shared from your social networks. After that initial connection, there are three different approaches. Some focus on creating a rich visual experience from the content they import, others provide logic to filter the top news based on what’s shared by your social graph, yet others focus on learning your interests to serve up the most relevant news. Some will try to do a combination of two of these, with varying filters and functionality, but just like the project triangle they can only choose two.

There has been a slew of apps that have launched to try and strike a similar magic to Flipboard. News.me got a lot of attention earlier in the year as a contender coming from the team that brought us bit.ly but probably didn’t get much traction due to trying a subscription model unlike any other app I’ve seen in this space. They recently decided to drop that monetization logic and branch out as a separate entity. I’ve been playing with this app recently and compared to Flipboard, they’ve filtered the content delivery mechanism somewhat. Flipboard simply displays all content unfiltered in reverse chronological order shared from my connected accounts at the time I refresh the app. News.me on the other hand appears to apply a filter that only displays links to web pages from select people I follow still being done in reverse chronological order from when I refresh the app. So if you’re interested in reading shared pages from those you follow while hiding status updates, photos, and other non-related content, News.me will help you past that noise.

While News.me does filter the noise, I still don’t know how it’s determining what content to show me and it’s still a limited approach by only covering items from the last few hours. To get a full digest of the most popular news shared by your social graph over the course of a full day you need to look at other apps such as Tweeted Times or Summify. I’m a big fan of these as they prioritize the news based on the number of people that shared it and they show me who those people were. In the case of Tweeted Times I can even create separate digests based on my Twitter lists which is good if you want your news in separate categories. While Summify doesn’t offer list creation, they go beyond Tweeted Times by including data from Google and Facebook in addition to Twitter. I originally felt this these would lead the pack for apps that I’d be most interested in but I can honestly say that Zite has really surprised me by offering up great content I wouldn’t have normally found in these apps.

Another feature I really like is segregating by media type. This means to take all the shared content from my social graph across multiple networks and put photos and videos into their own sections. Newsmix, Paper.li and Knowabout.it provide this feature. Newsmix is the only one of the three that has an iPad app though. Since I last covered Newsmix they’ve also added a website and yesterday announced a Facebook app to access the service. They are the first to offer this triple play. Something to note is there’s been a new market created for several apps that now only focus on video including Squrl, Showyou and Deja.

I initially learned of an interesting newcomer that originally launched as Postpost importing only your Facebook content but then was bought by Postano and quickly pivoted to be much more by aggregating across multiple sources including Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger and RSS feeds and also positioned itself as a way for brands to embed their social activity on their own sites. They still offer functionality for regular users and you can see my page here. You’ll notice that they also offer the ability to segregate content by media type as well. You can learn more about their service here and a demo video here.

If you thought the social magazine app scene was pretty heated up already, it’s about to get invaded by Google with an upcoming entrant called Propeller. It should be interesting to see what they have to offer to a pretty tough market to penetrate. It will be interesting to see what services they support and I suspect part of the motivation for this is to provide a way for people to consume Google+ content which currently isn’t available for any other apps due to the lack of an API being available. Even though I did come up with a hack to read Google+ content on Flipboard.

As a final thought you can see things are a bit complicated and still evolving in the social magazine space and I believe will continue to be for quite some time. I’m just glad to see that this area is really taking off. Below I’ve embedded an updated version of my original comparison matrix (direct link). If you know of any apps or services that fall into the social magazine space that I don’t have listed, let me know in the comments.

The last service I covered was Memolane which went live late last year. They took a timeline based approach to Lifestreaming and provide the ability to import very deep archived data from the services they support. They also allow the Lifestreams to be embedded on other sites. These were a few of the distinctive features that brought a taste of how new services may be able to provide a resurgence to the Lifestreaming services arena. With all of the new innovations with regards to Visualizing and accessing data via API on the web not to mention the emergence of HTML5 there are many new tricks that can start to become apparent to liven up this old dog (in web years of course) called Lifestreaming.

And then along comes Glossi which is the first Lifestreaming service I have written about this year.  I discovered Glossi from this post on The Next Web where Nancy Messieh not only provides a glimpse of this currently in private beta service, but also gains access to the inspiration and future plans from the founders. Luckily they were offering invites so I quickly snapped one up so I could take this new service for a spin. [Spolier alert: I have invites for readers below]

In the past, the the majority of Lifestreaming services took a pretty dry visual approach by simply aggregating posts from all services in a bland list format.  Glossi has taken a fresh new approach taking queues from newer visual designs and taking advantage of richer methods to display data.

Creating and setting up the account was super simple. Just plug in one or more of the current five services supported including Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook. I believe all services used a quick and simple oAuth process to connect your accounts. You also have the ability to set individual accounts to be either public or private, meaning that the content is only viewable by you. After you’ve connected all your accounts you can visit your profile page which depending on the services you’ve added will provide a nice visual display of your posts from each of the services.

The first thing to note with Glossi is that they break down your Lifestream into weekly chunks. So each page is comprised of all the posts within that week. For a profile that added Foursquare they will get a map with pushpins that represent all the checkins with a sidebar that offers a nice sliding list of the posts from each location along with a photo if one was added. Also, if you click on any of the pushpins it anchors directly to the post on the sliding bar. This is an example of using new thinking both from a presentation and functionality standpoint to add value to otherwise bland Lifestream data.

Below the Foursquare block you will get a random output of boxes that display tweets, photos, and posts from all of the other connected services in a visually appealing way. Also, each weekly page renders randomly upon every refresh. At the bottom of each weekly page are previous and next buttons to continue navigating through the timeline and if you mouseover a graph at the bottom you will get details of the number of tweets, checkins, posts, and photos as you slide through each week. The top of the page provides some basic profile information and avatar along with links to the external services you have linked up. Beyond that there is a button to visit other random Glossi profiles and there is a friending mechanism that acts as a way to bookmark other users profile pages.

So that’s Glossi in a nutshell. I like how they’ve taken the basic Lifestreaming data principal and have infused some newer ideas to make it more visually appealing. The Foursquare module is my favorite and I’d like to see some more innovative grouping of content done that way. In the interview Nancy did for The Next Web they mentioned that their top priority is to improve the visualization algorithm and then they will focus on adding new services including RSS, Posterous, Flickr, Gowalla, Vimeo, Last.fm. I hope they add YouTube as well.

I’m happy to see that although Lifestreaming services have languished, that there are still people that see the value and continue to try and provide new approaches to creating services around them. I look forward to watching Glossi progress with their development roadmap.

Glossi was nice enough to provide 100 invite codes to their private beta for Lifestream Blog readers. Just visit this link and go test out their service.

After your data is imported and displayed in a very elegant way where individual items will appear as content boxes on a page devoid of all the other Facebook site clutter. Also, the content will dynamically adjust itself depending on the resolution you are viewing the service with. I even stretched out a window across 3 displays to view the service at a whopping resolution of 5120 x 1200 (see below). Postpost is available through their website as well as a Chrome web app. I tested both versions and I recommend going with the Chrome web app. It takes advantage of some very nice UI enhancements not found on the Postpost website version and also seems to offer much better performance as it fetches new content dynamically while you scroll down the page.

Postpost running at 5120 x 1200 spanning 3 displays

Within each content box you have the ability to comment on and share each item on Facebook from within the app. Unfortunately you can’t share the content yet on other services such as Twitter. They also plan to add the ability to like in the near future. One of the more exciting features that the service provides is the ability to filter your Facebook content by several types. This includes a viewing filter for photos, videos, and links each displayed in their own isolated sections. This is a great feature that is also offered by the Newsmix iPad app but does this for both your Facebook and Twitter accounts. I expect this media filtering feature to start making its way to more social content readers in the future.

Overall this is a very nice way to view your content with visual enhancements and filtering not available to you on the Facebook service itself. My first question is if and when will they add Twitter support? I would also love to see Google Reader support. As I stated in my previous post I also find it very important for thew new readers to offer a way of prioritizing content so as to not just show me the most recent items. Lastly some deeper integration for filtering Facebook data by friends lists, or groups would be nice.

Robert Scoble recorded a video with the creator of Postpost which you can see below. There are also many good comments on Robert’s post which you can read here.

For instance Flipboard is one of my favorite apps on the iPad. Its ability to provide deep integration with Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader is nice. So for instance I have the ability to isolate the importing of specific Facebook pages, or Twitter lists, or Google Reader folders, but when I go to read these, Flipboard always shows me the most recent items from the last time it refreshed. I would like to see logic in place so that Flipboard could determine how to prioritize the content to show me. I will often read Flipboard in bed at the same time every night. In the new frenetic online world where we are trying to optimize our time and reduce noise, only offering to show me the most recent content isn’t good enough.

So what are some of the ways we can improve this? Well I’m already filtering the content I want to see based on only displaying items from the people I follow with regards to Facebook and Twitter shared links. But to make sure that I’m also viewing the best items daily from this subset of data we need to sort it using a method other than recency. So for Twitter I’d like it to show me the links shared by those I follow sorted from most to least just like I get in Tweeted Times. For Google Reader I’d like to see items sorted by the most shares/likes from the people I follow. Facebook could sort by mutual shares or quantity of likes and comments. In any case these methods would provide a better way to provide a “best of day” as opposed to just the most recent updates. Lastly, besides logic behind the sorting I’d also like to see content types displayed in separate sections. So you could have photos, videos, and even music within dedicated sections of this reader. So why isn’t there a service or app that does this yet? I have no idea but I’m starting so see some glimpses of hope that such a reader will emerge.

Last week I started playing with two new entrants that show signs of trying to tackle improving the social content reader. Trunk.ly is a service that aims to passively collect all of your shared links across several services. Currently they support Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Pinboard, and RSS feeds. After you’ve linked up your sources you will now get a page that displays all of the links you’ve shared on each of the respective services. So in the case of Twitter and Facebook all of our status update ramblings without links are omitted. Then as you follow other users on the service you get a page of all the most recent links they’ve shared. So far so good, but the feature that then struck me as cool is that alongside page that displays friends share links there is a counter that shows how many other users on the service also shared that link. The problem is that you can’t sort by this data or have access to a best of day based on it. Clicking on the share counter and seeing other users who shared the same link also acts as a great discovery tool to find other good link curators. One limitation of using a separate service such as Trunk.ly though is that I need all the people whose links I want see to use this service. If they offer a way to import the links of those you follow it would be great but I’m not sure that’s withing the scope of their roadmap. However, with RSS support you could get tricky and build some aggregated feeds and import them as an option. You can read some more about Trunk.ly at ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM.

Newsmix was another app announcement last week that got me excited. Billed as a similar app to Flipboard, it was some of the differences I focused on. You can import your Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader data although not as granularly as Flipboard. The user interface is very nice and similar to Flipboard, but it has some distinctions which include features I’ve been looking for in social content readers. Unlike Flipboard, the imported data doesn’t reside in a section defined by the source. They instead create sections based on the content type. So there’s a sports, technology, news, and several other content types. I’m not sure what logic they use to categorize the data and there are definitely missteps here, but it’s an interesting change with regards to organizing content. They also provide separate dedicated sections for photos and videos. They do a nice job here filtering links and shared photos to be displayed in this section.  They also have a top news section which I’m not sure how it’s determined and only supports 3 items at the moment, but could be a useful section. You can read more about Newsmix at TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb.

Since Newsmix costs $2.99 I thought I’d record a quick video demo showing the features I discuss above:

So while the concepts I’ve described for what I’d like to see in a future social content reader aren’t yet met by these two services, signs of these new features starting to appear is a step in the right direction. There are also many other services and apps, each using their own logic and display methods in the social content reader space including the already mentioned Tweeted Times, Paper.li, Cadmus and mobile/tablet apps Flipboard, Pulse,  My6Sense and Cascaad. If you want to learn more about how relevance has become the holy grail of filtering our content go read this post by Mahendra Palsule. I’ll continue to monitor developments in this area and share what I find here.

Enter Memolane, a service that seems to have put a good amount of time and effort into creating a flowing method for navigating a Lifestream on a timeline. They manage to keep a simple simple but rich view of the timeline while also allowing quick and easy navigation to data from several years back. Each source data item is presented in a visual way. Each piece of data that is added is considered a “memo”. The memo’s appear as individual items daily like a leaves on a vine. Photos, RSS feeds, and image supported tweets display thumbnails, Check-ins display pushpins for complete daily activity on mini-maps. They also have smart aggregation for similar items. For instance multiple last.fm listens are rolled up into a single entry that can be expanded to display multiple items. Another feature of the Last.fm data stream is the ability to link songs to either an Amazon.com product page or your Spotify client should you be so lucky to have access. YouTube videos will play embedded within the site and Flickr galleries can be navigated within their respective memo’s as well.

My page at Memolane

Besides the method by which these timeline services display their data, another distinguishing factor is which services are supported. Memolane has good support with their lineup which includes Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Last.fm, Foursquare, Tripit, YouTube, and RSS feeds. Timelines are much better when based on a large body of historical data. Memolane does a pretty nice job here with the interface making it easy navigate to individual dates from several years back. The amount of historical memo’s will boil down to how far back each service provides data. In my case I have Flickr photos imported that dated back to 2003, last.fm activity from 2005, but my Twitter data doesn’t appear to have been imported from my early usage.

Besides just offering the data imports that are displayed chronologically, Memolane also has a feature called “stories”. This allows you to manually select memo’s that you hand pick from your timeline to craft your own story. So you could collect items such as tweets, check-in’s, photos, and videos for a vacation as an example. These stories can also be collaborations where you can invite other Memolane friends to add their memo’s. Speaking of friends, you can add them on the service so that you can easily find and navigate their timelines on the service as well.

On January 11th they released added privacy features which include adding more granular privacy settings which can now be set on individual services as opposed to all or nothing on your full timeline. Also, within the service there are also settings to have the full timeline private, only shared with other Memolane friends, or completely public. These privacy features can be set for the “stories” feature as well.

Here’s a video recorded by the Memolane team showing their functionality

Memolane has gotten some attention as it was started by the original founders of Skype. The service is currently in private beta and I’ve been testing it since late last year. While they still need to iron out some kinks it’s a nice service. It has already been covered well by TheNextWeb as well as ReadWriteWeb. If you enjoy going back to old photo albums or journals then you will really enjoy this digital equivalent where you can just easily slide your mouse and revisit digital memories from years gone by.

The folks at Memolane have been nice enough to offer 200 invite codes to the readers of Lifestream Blog. Just visit this link and enter the invite code “lifestream“.

If you’d like to learn more about the team behind Memolane you can watch this video interview by Robert Scoble

First thing you need to do is choose a username for your account which will then provide you with a cool url to send folks to in the form of about.me/<yourusername>. You then provide some basic information including your full name, headline, and bio that is displayed on a custom background image that you upload to the service. You can choose custom fonts and colors to use for your bio information. Lastly you can choose which of the 10 services supported you want to add to your profile. If you want to add a service that isn’t supported they allow you to import an RSS feed. Once you’re done providing this information your initial profile page is done.

After you’ve planted your profile and promoted it…just sit back for a while after some time you can return to view some stats about your visitors. They offer some basic stats that you’d come to expect from any site traffic such as pageviews, time spent on site, and unique visitors but they also offer some cool stats that are unique to their service. Their click stats provide whether a user clicked on any of the social media links and then breaks those down by which ones. They’ll also show the outbound clicks from the page to specific social media services or services you add manually. They also provide some stats info around your Twitter and Facebook activity including averages and which users you interact with the most.

When I first heard about the release of about.me I immediately thought it sounded very similar to Flavors.me (which I’ve covered quite a bit) so I wanted to test the service to determine what the differences were. I read this post over at The Next Web that seems to have determined that about.me is the clear winner of the two. I don’t feel that determination can be made so easily without providing key differences. I’ve recently been playing around with both services to determine the differences between the two. Below are some high level observations.

Flavors.me has been around for almost a year now so they’ve had quite a bit of time to mature. Setting up a your profile is very similar to about.me but you will however notice that you have quite a few more options available in many areas. For instance one of the biggest differences is that they have several different layouts for displaying your social media services whereas about.me only offers one way to do this. There are also quite a bit of differences in what content is displayed from each of the services you link up. On about.me LinkedIn only offers current position, education, and connection numbers, whereas Flavors imports enough information to provide a rich resume on the site. Flavors.me also currently offers 25 services so there’s a good chance that you may find some that you want that aren’t currently available on about.me. But when it comes to stats you don’t get any with Flavors.me unless you upgrade from the free account to their $20 per year premium version which will then give you some standard analytics and the ability to also use Google Analytics. Another feature of the premium account on Flavors.me is allowing you to host your site using any custom domain name.

So as you can see there are some key differences between these two services and I’d recommend that you try them both out to determine which one offers the better mix of features that are right for you. It’s great to see competition in this space as I feel these services fill a nice gap for people to use. Having the two of them around is only going to make this area of services become better.

Visit my about.me page here and my Flavors.me page here.

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Lifestream in the form of a Bitly bundle by Joshua Auerbach (click image to visit the page)

The features Bitly has packed into their new bundle tool are fantastic. If you provide a link to a tweet they offer a screenshot with clickable links, if you link to a Flickr photo there is a preview, if you link to a Foursquare checkin there’s a map and details of the location, if you link to a YouTube video an embed is placed on the page. Other features include  providing an overall description and commentary for each of the links added to the bundle, tracking of clicks for each link in the bundle, stats and url sources for the bundle, and ability for people to comment using Disqus on the bundle page. These are just some of the high level features I’ve seen so far.

So I find it pretty interesting to add this new wrinkle of personal curation to Lifestreaming. The original concept is to just link up some services and aggregate all content generated across them in a reverse chronological order. Giving this some thought based on new tools we can make them much more interesting at times by self filtering the full stream. We can also weave the items together to add more context or tell a story with a tool like this which adds more value. While we wouldn’t necessarily do this on a daily basis, there are definitely times when it would make sense.

So while this post was about one person’s use of Bitly’s new feature for Lifestreaming, the bigger story here is actually about using curation tools and services to both filter and augment our Lifestreams. I’ve played with several other of these new breed of curation services besides Bitly and also really like Storify which offers one distinct advantage in allowing a bundle to be embedded elsewhere.I’m also watching curated.by. I think this is a new territory for Lifestreaming that may provide some more interesting stories for us to watch of one another in the future.

Unfortunately, after reading their blog post and visiting my profile, I was pretty disappointed that their influence score and metrics only take Twitter data into account. This has already been done and they have the potential to offer so much more. What a bummer. Hopefully they will incorporate additional data points they are already collecting to modify the scoring algorithm.

In any case it’s still worth checking out your profile on their site as they do offer one interesting graph that provides the percentages of tweets broken down by updates, @replies, retweets, and links. Looking at user profiles and analyzing those 4 data points is pretty interesting. I personally like following many people on Twitter because of the content they share so the links percentage is a good metric for me to determine whether I want to follow new people. Also, after doing some a/b comparison testing on a few people to see their scores on Backtype and Klout, there is definitely scoring differences so I’m curious to what they are. I’ll have to dig in some more.

In any case the influence scoring sector is getting hot and I’m sure more will be joining this area. It should be nice to watch it mature and incorporate more data. Let’s see if Backtype can push the needle further quickly as the race is on.

As you can see from the screenshot above it pulls some nice data about me including:

• My Twitter profile info
• Icons and links to 18 social media sites I’m registered on (not sure how many services are supported)
• My recent activity across several of these sites for example: latest tweets, Plancast events, photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, favorited songs from last.fm, and bookmarks from Delicious
• A contact list of the people I follow on Twitter with icons and links to their social media services and Qwerly profiles. Very handy!
• A link to my Klout profile

Some other nice features that it offers are the ability to claim your profile by using Twitter Oauth. Once you’ve done that you can edit your basic profile information along with being able to add or edit the social media services associated with your account. Once you have your profile setup the way you like it, they offer the ability create embed code that you can use many ways such as adding to your about page or providing as an email signature. Lastly they offer an API for developers to tap into their service.

So there are quite a few cool features with this service but I have found the ability to navigate to my contacts profile pages to be one of the funnest. By being able to get a simple focused Lifestream of my friends recent activity across all the services they use makes for a fun way to surf around and discover content they are sharing or creating. It would appear that this service has the underlying logic to create the content consumption holy grail I’ve written about.

So as you can see I really like this site and for being in alpha, Qwerly is already a pretty great and sophisticated service and I look forward to watching how it develops and evolves in the future. Go claim your profile and start surfing your friends lifestreams now.

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