A new Air app for Lifestreaming was launched today called Skimmer. I’ve only played with it for a short while but it has a pretty diverse set of features. It can import your feeds from several services including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and blog.

It will import status updates and allow you to reply and post both to Twitter and Facebook separately. You can also filter all your imported feed data by keyword, service, or friends lists from the main interface. There are 3 different types of views available for the feed which offer some unique differences from other clients I have used.

There are also dedicated interfaces for your Flickr and YouTube accounts that are presented in a great looking interface. In fact the interface and presentation throughout is one of the things that makes this app standout. Besides allowing you to view your imported photos and videos, the app offers the ability to upload to Flickr and YouTube as well with a fancy drag and drop interface.

Probably the most unique and gorgeous feature as well is the profile mode which creates an awesome content mashup of your data that you can customize and even embed as a widget on your own blog. This feature alone is worth the price of admission. So as you can see the app is pretty different and offers a combination of features that I haven’t seen before.

I only skimmed the surface (pun intended) and I really need to dig in more. There is already quite a bit of coverage on the app which I have linked to below. I just wanted to provide some quick info. In my short time with the app I recommend you download now and check it out. Well worth it just to play with the different and wonderful interface.

Read about Skimmer elsewhere

• Skimmer brings your social streams to the desktop - Webware
• Skimmer: Visual Desktop App for Tracking Your Favorite Social Sites - Mashable
• Skimmer Brings a Sleek New Look to Social Browsing - ReadWriteWeb
• Fallon Launches ‘Life-streaming’ Tool - AdWeek

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Site: Martin Gardner
Code: Custom

Site: Pinar
Code: Custom

Site: Aline
Code: Lifespot & FriendFeed

Site: Mr. Yap
Code: Flickr & Twitter API with CSS, XHTML, and JSON

Site: Ryan Parr
Code: Custom

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Storytlr is a new service that focuses on lifestreaming with an added story telling angle. But it offers quite a bit more than just that niche based feature addition. It actually offers much more as I’ll cover shortly. The service was created by created by Laurent Eschenauer who told me that this is a personal project built with friend Alard Weisscher in their spare time. You would never know that after spending time on the site as it offers as clean and polished an experience as you will find on most of the top services.

Setting up an account begins like any other Lifestreaming service by adding your accounts from social media sites. They currently support Delicious, Flickr, Google Reader, Last.fm, Picasa, Qik, Seesmic, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, and the ability to add additional RSS feeds. You also have the ability to manually create posts in the categories of status, blog, link, image and audio, the last two of which are based on uploading the assets to their site.

The Storytell feature allows you to convey a single story by aggregating data from Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter based on a specific date range. Once configured, it then creates a custom overlayed media show displaying each of the items as a “boxy” mashup. This offers a nice gallery view that isolates the content by a single experience in a nice visual manner. I tried creating one but didn’t have proper content to adequately create a “story”. In creating mine I didn’t see the ability to flag which items should be part of the story based on the date ranges. I would think this would be necessary as some items that aren’t relevant would more than likely sneak in.

Click to view

While that feature is very nice, Storytlr offers many other great things. The Lifestream page itself can be most likened to one you would create using Wordpress and a Lifestreaming plugin. You can choose from several included themes as well as provide a custom header image, background image, and title for the Lifestream. But wait, there’s more. They offer a “widget” section that offers almost the same functionality as that of Wordpress with regards to providing the functionality in the sidebar. You have the ability to display and re-arange functions such as search, archives, latest comments, links to your profiles on other services, and even the ability to add your own widgets that can use custom html or javascript. They even offer the ability to host your Lifestream on your own domain.

The data displayed in the Lifestream offers subtle changes depending on the theme you choose. Each item offers the ability for commenting. Comments are then included as part of the latest comments widget in the sidebar. You also can flag individual items as private. There’s an add this function for every item. The Archive that appears in the sidebar is identical to that in Wordpress offering the ability to filter items by month and year.

Click to see my page

The last feature they offer is one that I’ve been very interested in with regards to Lifestreaming data. It’s the ablity to provide backups. The current implementation only offers the ability to export data from 10 sources as CSV files, but I like their thinking along these lines. They also state that in the future they will offer the ability to download binary files as well.

Overall I’m very impressed with this service especially considering the resources used to create it. It definitely creates a valueable offering for users interested in creating a customized Lifestream with Wordpress-like functionality and flexibility. Definitely worth a look and can only get better over time.

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Many of you may already be familiar with developer Dean J Robinson. He already has several popular devlopment projects under his belt. He’s written the Fluency Admin theme which is a replacement for the current Wordpress Admin theme. He also wrote Hahlo which is one of the top Twitter clients available for the iPhone. You can find all his currently available projects on this page.

Well apparently Dean is a fan of Lifestreaming because he’s currently developing a new Lifestreaming Plugin for Wordpress. Around March of this year, he tried using several Lifestreaming plugins and determined none of them operated quite how he wanted so he decided to write his own.

Dean J Robinsos’s Lifestream

Here’s the details from a development update on 4/6/08

CaptainPlanet is basically a ‘lifestream’ manager for your WordPress blog. Plans are to support a number of popular feeds, which are aggregated (and archived…) for display on you site. Will have an awesome ‘manage’ screen (one of the few bits thats actually working correctly at the moment), and also makes use of the new ‘shortcode’ API in WP2.5. Will also have several built in function that will do away with the need for some of the JS callbacks I currently use for things like Twitter and Flickr.

So not much had appened on the plugin front until an update a few weeks ago on 8/17/08

The return of Captain Planet, bigger and better. Ok so the super rushed dev of the first iteration didn’t go so well. This one should be better with a bit of luck. In the backend its more flexible, allowing you to add whatever feeds you want, its working wonderfully with any feed from Feedburner, but I’m yet to give it a real workout with raw feeds directly from flickr/delicious/twitter etc, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t continue to work.

I’ve also cleaned up the admin (which none of you had seen anyway), and added a few ‘helper’ functions (with more to come). For example, the latest tweet show at the top of each page, and the recent flickr images on the homepage are both generated out of Captain Planet, no more waiting for external javascript on each load.

I’ve already had a couple of request from people who’d like to test it, which is great, and once I’ve gotten to a point what I’m happy for that to happen I let them in on the fun.

And here we are now in September and still no Plugin. This seems like a project worthy of anticipation. I really hope that he’s close to releasing it as this could be a very nice addition to the existing library of Lifestreaming plugins available for Wordpress.

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Tumblr was one of the first Lifestreaming services that gained popularity with it’s minimalist blogging approach with beautifully designed sites. Unfortunately I feel that they took a step backwards when they began limiting sites to only allow for 5 feeds to be imported.

Last year in my coverage I came across a very similar service called Soup.io which I feel offers richer options, support for more services, and great flexibility. If you are a fan of Tumblr, you owe it to yourself to take a look at Soup.io.

Today, Richard MacManus proclaimed it’s currently one of his favorite web services. Andy Desoto who has been writing quite a bit about Lifestreaming lately picked up on the Soup.io mention at RWW today and wrote up a good review.

Here’s a snip:

If you’ve known about this service for quite some time now, feel free to move along; released in the last quarter of 2007, it’s hardly new, especially in the rapid-fire world of Web 2.0 startups.  But if you’ve never heard of it like I hadn’t, read along: soup.io just might be what you’re looking for.

You can read the rest of Andy’s review here.

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