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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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.

Cliqset has been around for a while, but I have just recently stumbled across their service. The easiest way to describe Cliqset is that it’s much like Plaxo in that it wants to be your centralized profile. You can add all your contact info into Cliqset and you’re profile will be viewable to all or just your set of contacts which are also added to Cliqset. This ties you and your contacts information and web activity together into one site.

Cliqset enters the lifestreaming world by including all your various web content into your profile. See Example. The profile page is standard fair, as far as profile pages go, with your online content placed in a steady stream. The items are nicely grouped together so you don’t get a long stream of pictures when you decide to upload all your vacation pictures, usurping all your other activity.

The main feature that sets Cliqset apart is not its lifestream capabilities, but its platform that you can use to ensure all your social profiles are the same. This can help bring unity among all your social profiles. Also Cliqset provides you with a OpenID url that is the same as your profile url. This can further help in unifying your online identity. I have not been able to dive into the platform tool much.

Cliqset can aggregate from 30 social services including location based services like Brightkite and FireEagle.  Adding each service is very straight forward and simple. Most of the items simply ask for your username and many (as far as setting up your profile goes) don’t ask for any login credentials. Adding my Yahoo profile was the only item I had some difficulty getting setup.

Cliqset is a nice, clean profile site with lifestreaming capabilites. It supports many features that profile pages offered by Google and Yahoo do not provide. Cliqset can most closely resemble Plaxo in number of features for your online profile.

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Below is a cute little video created by Nokia discussing their nVine service which provides a beautiful geo based visualization of user submitted data from their phones. From your phone you can submit geo tagged photos, videos, and music activity to the service and share it with other users.

Here’s the video

Visiting the site you are presented with a Flash site that displays a map of the world with flags depicting locations where users have created vines. You can zoom into the map at any given location to reveal more vines the closer you go in. You can also view latest vines and even search for vines.

I zoomed into several vines I found in Mexico and came across a few users that had submitted photos and video of a Radiohead concert.

Click image to view site

Click image to view site

I found this to be pretty cool and it got me thinking about how we really haven’t seen much in the way of collaborative geo-tagging on maps as it relates to Lifestreaming. This definitely is an area ripe for some innovation.

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Tonight I read over on SEO and Tech Daily that the Windows Live blog reported yesterday that they have now completed a rollout that has added a significant number of new sites that can now display web activities on your profile page.

You just need to visit http://profile.live.com/WebActivities/ to configure which ones you want to add. There are 20 new sites that have been added. Here’s a breakdown by category mentioned in the post:

• If you use a social networking service worldwide, you can add your updates from:
  Facebook, Twitter, Arto, Daum, Fotolog, Hevre, wow.ya.ru, Zoo
• If you share photos online you can now add updates to Windows Live from:
  Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, Metroflog, Bilddagboken
• If you have a blog, you can add it to Windows Live from:
  Wordpress, LiveJournal, Typepad, Overblog, or the custom blog activity, which works with Blogger and others.
• If you use any of these sites for information, music, video, or radio service, you can add them to Windows Live:
  MSN, The Zune Social, iLike, Pandora, Last.fm, Dada, Dailymotion
• And if you use a variety of different review sites, you can add them to Windows Live from:
  Digg, Flixster, StumbleUpon, Tripit, Yelp

I’ve also provided a screenshot of my web activities page below

There are several other new features with this release including the ability to import contacts from Facebook, Hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Tagged. The display of the Lifestream itself unfortunately hasn’t been updated and is a bit bland utilizing only text descriptors. In either case I’m glad that Microsoft is still pushing forward and dedicating resources towards increasing the Lifestreaming efforts on the Windows Live service. I’m keeping an eye on them hoping they continue to improve.

Screenshot of my profile page

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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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