When I first started this blog in March of ‘07 there were only a handful of custom scripts that allowed you to aggregate your social services. Over the months thereafter a large number of services launched to do this for you. In November of ‘08 I wrote about how Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google were all slowly rolling out pieces to bring Lifestreaming to the mainstream. In Google’s case it was the creation of the user profile and the ability to link our social services to it. It was a small step towards their larger plan to enter the social streaming landscape.

Pulling data from multiple social services and having friends view and interact with it in one place has become an integral part of the web’s evolution. Google finally entered the social streaming space last week with the release of Buzz. With Google entering the market, it pretty much sends out the definitive statement acknowledging that social activity aggregation is here to stay.

I feel Google has closely watched the social aggregation phenomenon play out over the last few years whilst planning for a way to tap it, specifically as its become a critical data point for search. I’m sure I will write quite a bit about Buzz as time goes on but I wanted to focus a little on the decision to integrate it into Gmail.

Buzz could become a social destination and remove Gmail requirements in one simple step

I don’t think it was a good idea for Google to try and build a thriving social media platform strapped on to email. There are a couple of issues with this. Email is still a very important communication tool used primarily for business, private, or small group conversations. It’s a place where we can get work and other things done without the distraction of social media. Do we really need social media to invade our productivity tools? What’s next a sliding ticker of Twitter updates coming across a column on Excel?

Besides, another problem is that to participate in this social circle you need to be a Gmail user. That alone eliminates a huge number of existing users that don’t have accounts and adds additional overhead which I imagine will alienate many new users. Sure the majority of techies use Gmail as their webmail client but it’s still in 3rd place overall as a mail provider much smaller than Yahoo or Microsoft.

Speaking of Yahoo, most of my tech friends are Gmail users and yes I have an account there but Yahoo is my primary email service. Many probably don’t know it but Yahoo rolled out similar functionality to Buzz over a year ago. While they do offer a standalone version of their social service, they also decided to integrate with email. Yahoo’s interface to add services is a thing of beauty and their profile pages have matured very well with a clean design and great functionality. So Google has apparently taken a similar approach but didn’t pay attention to Yahoo’s much better refinements.

Yahoo’s email integration has been pretty unobtrusive for me and has never really interfered with my existing mail usage. Yahoo does a good job of relegating the social data to its own tab and never forced any of its functionality to invade my email. The only time I’ve seen them do something that did cross that boundary actually happened in a situation I thought was pretty cool.

Yahoo mail provides the latest updates from the services users have linked to their profiles on the sent email confirmation page now. I think that’s an innovative way to leverage a user’s activity stream. I liked their thinking here but think they need a simple option to remove this feature for those that want to opt out.

Forced Gmail integration with Buzz is something that many people (including myself) have not been happy about. Yahoo got it right by not requiring email integration to participate in their social service. You have the ability to view all of your friends activities from an “updates” tab on your profile page. I think this is a very important distinguishing factor and wish Google would offer the same thing. They could do this by also offering a separate activity tab from our Google profile pages. I think this would provide a giant step in the right direction for keeping Buzz separate from Gmail and building out profiles to become a social destination at the same time.

My profile & social activity as well as my friends is viewable separate from email on Yahoo

Besides forced Gmail intergration another problem we’ll see with Buzz is that it’s an aggregator which has proven to be a difficult sell to the mainstream. FriendFeed was a pioneer in this area and have created an amazing service to enjoy social streaming. Still they saw growth flatten and decided to sell to Facebook last year. Google has huge mindshare so it’s possible they could overcome mainstream penetration issues but the Gmail integration and what I feel has been a pretty poor user experience out of the gate isn’t a good start. I think more mainstream folks already happy with their current social network and in the current state of Buzz won’t be compelled enough to add yet another service. In the end a service is only as good as the number of friends you have participating on them.

As negative as I may sound about Buzz right now, I’m actually hoping they really improve it and will be rooting for them. For a non-beta release it seems very rushed and unpolished so I’m thinking they decided this product had to get out the door before they continue to lose traction in the social media landscape. As such I’m sure they will be allocating resources to continue trying to get it right. I will be an active user on the service and will continue to cover their developments for you here. You can connect with me on Google Buzz here.

There are several sites out there allowing us to add ourselves to lists describing our skills, specialties or other information about ourselves. Wefollow is a popular one and I’ve also  seen many use Twibes as well. That’s fine and dandy but we know many folks see themselves as things they clearly are not. For instance I’d be very leery of many people who add themselves to a “social media expert” list.

A few weeks ago I was talking to Jesse Stay (developer of  SocialToo) about an idea I had to create an identity page for people on Twitter by building a tag cloud to analyze the keywords made up from the lists they’re on. Jesse who seems to know about every Twitter app out there  told me that there already was one and sent me the info. So I visited the site and gave it a try.

Here’s the page it created for me

click image to view the page

You can see in the image all the keywords used to describe me based on the 142 lists I am currently on. The more times the word is used, the bigger it appears on my tag cloud. You can also click on any of the words in the cloud and it displays the lists you are on that use it and the people that put you on them. Lastly as a nice discovery feature it displays the top followed lists on Twitter for that given keyword.

This app was created by Mustexist and you can go create your cloud here. It’s pretty enlightening to see the keywords that other folks use to describe you. I also feel that it paints a much more realistic picture of who people are by crowdsourcing that info as opposed to taking people by their own word. I’d imagine that many “social media experts” may end up with the biggest keyword in their cloud being “douchebag”.

One of the additional aspects of Twitter Lists is that it now provides a new datapoint to help in the ways we can calculate influence and define users. I’m also a big fan of Favstar.fm and what they’re doing. Favorites would be another great datapoint to add to the mix but it doesn’t seem many people use it enough for it to be useful at the current time. I’m hoping that will change.

Initially the only measure of influence on Twitter was based on number of followers. It’s nice to see that as the service is maturing we are seeing features that offer better ways to help expose many other great people on the service. There are some services out there that are tackling this like Klout and Tweetrank. Yesterday Twitter announced the revamp of their controversial suggested user list. While not perfect it is a step in the right direction.

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.