If you’re not familiar with Flavors.me it’s Lifestreaming service that I really like. I wrote about how it’s a great way to easily get a beautiful Lifestream built quickly. Well they have now officially launched their service and along with continuing to offer the great features available during the beta for free, they now have premium accounts with additional features.
For a mere $20 a year you can also get the following
Custom domain
Real time traffic stats
Support for Clicky and Google Analytics
A fancy Lightbox contact form
They also plan to release a more advanced layout framework, an updated members directory along with a powerful search and new browsing tools. You can take a look at my page on Flavors.me here.
If you’re headed to SXSW be sure to meet the team on Saturday March 13th at 11:15AM at the Meet the press event.
I read this post over at MakeUseOf.com titled “How To Create Your Own Lifestream On A Wordpress Blog In 3 Easy Steps”. This is a good tutorial and utilizes the very popular Simplepie RSS framework which I’ve written about many times that has been used to create custom Lifestreams. However I wouldn’t call this exactly easy. If you want to get a nice pretty feature rich Lifestream up in Wordpress I still recommend the Wordpress Lifestream Plugin as the easiest method.
This How to is very good and offers nice details on how to configure Simplepie and customize a page in Wordpress to create your Lifestream. However it requires editing PHP code and messing with Wordpress templates, so if you’re comfortable with that, then this How to is right up your alley.
From the post
First of all, you’ll need some plugins for your Wordpress blog. Remember that if you have a current installation of Wordpress, you can install these plugins directly from the “Install Plugins” section of the Admin of your Wordpress blog. I will also link to the plugins’ pages so you can get an idea of what to search for and how to install them.
SimplePie Core (needed for “SimplePie” plugin for Wordpress)
SimplePie plugin for Wordpress
Exec-PHP (gives you the ability to run PHP code in text widgets, posts and pages)
I was notified by reader Greets Wout from Holland that he’s created a blog that covers Lifestreaming. You can find his site at Lifestreamen.nl
Keep in mind that the site is written in Dutch but utilizes the Wibiya toolbar which you can find at the bottom where there is a translate button for English and several other languages.
I came across this post tonight which would lead you to believe so. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Here’s an image from the patent filed:
Here’s a snip from the post at All Facebook
On Tuesday, Facebook was awarded a major patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”. This is a huge deal for a number of reasons, most significantly that it grants Facebook the opportunity to pursue other social networks which are infringing on their patent. Included in the patent are additional claims including feed filters, feed advertising, searching the feed, and more. (update We’ve been told that this is about the implicit feed stories. Will update when we have more info.)
If you haven’t heard of SimplePie let me tell you that it’s a great PHP library that can be used to do all kinds of things with RSS or Atom feeds. I have used it as a raw library as well as the core library for both Wordpress Plugins and Drupal Modules. It’s fairly simple to use, powerful and has good caching which is necessary when working with RSS feeds.
I came across this tutorial a while back and wanted to share it with you as it provides both a good tutorial for using SimplePie along with the application of building a Lifestream with it. If you’ve ever considered getting your feet wet with some simple PHP coding and think building a Lifestream from scratch to learn that, well you’ve found the right place for that.
Here’s the intro to the tutorial
In this tutorial we’ll build a page that gathers up the RSS feeds of all those little bits of your life and presents them all together in one spot. To do that, we’ll use SimplePie, a feed parsing class written in PHP. It’s powerful, it’s open source, and it’s easy to use. We’ll then hack on the output a little, and make it all look gorgeous with HTML and CSS. The techniques we’ll cover are also useful if you find that you need to aggregate RSS from many sources, like a news page.
Last December Edo Segal wrote a post for TechCrunch titled “The Dawning Of Ambient Streams” on how the evolution of Lifestream technologies will bring about some major changes in our future.
He states
We will be seeing the first swells of this coming tsunami in the years to come, but for our children the ambient sense will play a bigger and bigger role as it slowly evolves and weaves itself into their consciousness much like Google search weaved itself into their memory functions.
He then goes on to describe the building blocks that make up what he calls an ambient stream and then provides a diagram to illustrate how they may enter our lives.
Before these building blocks can create an ambient stream which is not overwhelming, all of this data needs to pass through a filter. The Holy Grail is a filter which only serves up information which is relevant based on who you are, your social graph, what you or your friends are doing now, what you or friends have done before, and in context of other information you are consuming. It needs to be delivered wherever you are and on whatever device or display can deliver the ambient stream: mobile phone, laptop computer, TV, heads-up display in vehicle or inside your glasses.
Definitely some interesting thoughts which make a lot of sense as we move forward in the years to come and find ways to manage the data.
I’ve been seeing quite a few Storytlr sites pop up now that the code has been released as open source. Ars Technica who like the service and had written about it in the past decided to write a post with details of the open source release along with setup information. The post was written by Ryan Paul and he even goes into some of the basics about Lifestreaming and offers up some alternatives to Storytlr.
From the post
The code, which is available under the Apache license, is written in PHP and uses the Zend framework. It’s not a masterpiece of modern software, but it’s reasonably well-written and relatively easy to customize. Storytlr has some intriguing features, but it never seemed all that compelling to me as a hosted service—just another place on the Internet to accumulate my crap. As an open source project, however, it’s a whole lot more interesting because now users can deploy it on any infrastructure and extend it by adding support for additional services.
Woo Themes has added yet another Lifestreaming theme for Wordpress to their arsenal. This new one is called MyStream. Here’s a breakdown of its features:
A social profiles widgetized zone with custom widgets to display your Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, Flickr, etc, profiles in the sidebar.
7 Smashing MyStream-specific widgets, including the new Tabber widget, which allows you to move that stunning tabber anywhere in the sidebar.
Flexible 3 column layout with a variety of different widgetized spaces & layouts.
6 delicious colour schemes to choose from!
Last but not least, the brand new WooFramework2 with updated options panel
The theme offers short blog excerpts and links to 4 social media profiles in an about area. It also offers a stander aggregated Lifestream list but also supplements that with a widgetized photos & videos area in the sidebar. The theme costs $70 and you can get more details on it here and see a demo of the theme here.
Note there are many Lifestreaming themes available for Wordpress and I’ve provided a list of all of them here.
Flavors.me is a new Lifestreaming service launched at the end of last year that I really liked. Yesterday they announced the addition of several new features. They’ve now added support for Foursquare, Posterous, Wordpress, Blogger, Etsy, and LinkedIn. They’ve also improved the data coming in from the Netflix and RSS feeds. They now offer permalinks to individual service pages. Lastly they’ve now added more font sizing controls for various site entities as well as multiple options for bullets.
Screenshot of the new font options and Foursquare addition. Click to visit.
They plan to add support to YouTube very very soon and are looking into Facebook support. If you haven’t tried the service you really should. Although it’s in private beta, the founders have provided Lifestream Blog readers with invites. Just use the code ‘lifestreamblog’ when signing up to get in.
Noserub was one of the first community based, open source Lifestreaming apps released. I first wrote about it back in March of 2008. It seems like I’ve been noticing a quite a few niche based social streaming sites pop up lately and I just came across another one at Feedmaze.com that was built on Noserub. Noserub is just one of community based Lifestreaming options out there that can be used to create a site. Below is some info on its release and a screencast of the service.
Lifestreams are a great way to aggregate content as there are so many services and social networks out there, that is hard to keep track of all of them. Its great having your own lifestream that you can share on your own site, but its even better when you can mix your stream with others that have the same interests as you.
FeedMaze is powered by Noserub, and we were lucky enough to get hold of one of the people who help create it, and have them as part of our community. Lance Wicks has been a great help so far with the site, and combined with the other developers of Noserub, we hope to make FeedMaze.com the best experience for all of you.
Amidst rumors of a possible shutdown, former MyBlogLog Product Manager Ian Kennedy wrote a helpful post today for users of the service. He provided details outlining ways to both export your data from the service as well as finding alternatives for some of the features. His post covers the following topics:
Grab your Stats
Tighten your Connections
Back up your Contacts
Subscribe Directly
Check out Alternative Widgets
From Ian’s Post
It was a sad day when I read the ReadWriteWeb post about the rumored shutdown of MyBlogLog. Yahoo has since come out with a vague response that pulling the plug is only one of several “options” but I thought it good to post a few things you can do now just in case they do take MBL out behind the shed.
I saw a tweet from Jason Schuller a few days ago where he announced a new Lifestreaming Wordpress theme being released called “Social Life”. He included an image of the theme which I’ve provided below:
Jason let me today that he was finishing up documentation and the demo for the theme. It looks like another nice addition to the ever-growing list of Lifestreaming Wordpress themes. I’m looking forward to this latest release and I’ll keep you posted on when it drops.
UPDATE 1/12
Jason has released a live demo of the theme that you can now see here. Along with the live demo he also posted an image of the admin options for the theme here.
After playing with it for a little I’m very impressed. This offers a very nice navigation experience and I like the segregation and ability to filter by content type. The way blog posts are presented as you drill down through the menu is also very cool. I’m also usually not a fan of fluid width designs but this theme does a nice great job of dynamically going to 2 column instead of a single one on my 1920 px width display. If I had to complain about anything it would be that I’d prefer a lightbox effect for the photos & videos to keep the user on the site instead of navigating away. Overall though this is an awesome addition to Wordpress Lifestreaming themes and I’m eyeballing using it myself.
Update 1/20
The theme is now available. It costs $75 and you can get more details on it here. Below is a screencast created for the theme
Note there are many Lifestreaming themes available for Wordpress and I’ve provided a list of all of them here.
Even in this day and age there are still some web services out there that offer no way of sharing the data created by them from an RSS feed or API. This can be problematic if you want to add that data to your Lifestream.
Well there are some tools out there that will allow you to do this with the best one available being Dapper. Lifestreamer Mark Cheverton wrote a post providing details on a process where he did this for a site called Lovefilm and shared the details. He even processed the Dapper created data through Yahoo Pipes to clean things up even further.
It’s a good read if you have a similar situation and you want to learn how to do this.
From his post:
Overall this probably took me two hours to setup, but a lot of that was learning and fiddling around the edges. Dapper is certainly a very powerful tool and combined with the more programmatic functionality of Yahoo! Pipes, which allows me to start making my locked up information more portable. The one restriction at the moment is the current inability to automate any logins, so if you don't have a shortcut private URL for your data you're out of luck on an automated login. I think this is possibly an opportunity for OpenId in the future.
Here’s a post from reader John Eckman where he discusses his journey researching and choosing a platform to host his Lifestream. It’s a good read where he provides information on several different options along with insightful details.
From the post:
For a while now I’ve been testing out a few lifestreaming platform options. My current shortlist includes four open source approaches / platforms and two hosted offerings.
I think ultimately I’ll want to keep an open source (LAMP) platform because I want to own the data in my lifestream, have backups of it, and be able to move it around as I please. This leaves me choosing between a platform linked to a blog (WordPress or MovableType) or a standalone one (Sweetcron, Storytlr or similar) that just powers the lifestream.
Today Len Kendall did a great write-up outlining the features and value of Posterous. He did this from a PR standpoint but I think it applies to everyone. If you still haven’t tried the service, this is a great overview.
You can also take a look at my post describing the difference between Posterous and the more common Lifestreaming aggregation model.
Len’s post also discusses why you should be Lifestreaming by covering the value of sharing resources with other people and spurring conversations around that content. I’ve also written several posts on that subject includingWhy you should be Lifestreaming?and 5 elements for a well balanced Lifestreamworth reading if you need some more reasons.
One of my favorite features about Posterous is its auto-posting (syndicatoin) features. Here’s a snip from Len describing his workflow with regards to that:
Syndication is one of the biggest benefits of Posterous. When you send an email post, it not only pops up on your Posterous blog, but you can easily have it syndicatate to all your other pages such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, etc. A lot of people ask (in PR, and outside) how do you manage so many social networks? The answer is that you don't. You just manage a few that syndicate the content elsewhere. I personally don't like spending time on Facebook and LinkedIn for example, but all my content still streams to those sites. If people want to follow me there, they can do easily because of this tool. If they happen to interact with me there, I have notifications in place to respond on the specific site if needed.
I’ve seen a few folks talking about having setup the newly released open source version of Storytlr on their own servers. Pretty cool to start seeing what is surely the beginning of many more of these popping up.
I read over at GigaOM about the Pepsi Refresh Project which plans to award millions of dollars to individuals and organizations that turn good ideas into projects that make a difference.
From the post
Pepsi is seeking ideas that make us think, inspire us and ignite participation; ideas that make good things better or improve situations; ideas that refresh. The process is simple. Individuals pitch a plan. The public votes. The top projects win. And this process repeats itself every month for 10 months…The Pepsi Refresh Project will award $5,000, $25,000, $50,000 and $250,000 to individuals and organizations that turn good ideas into projects that make a difference.
Upon visiting the site I couldn’t help but notice the Lifestream design in action on the site. I also find this competition interesting as it is another major corporation realizing the value in funding incentivized prize competitions which is what we do at the X PRIZE Foundation (my day job). It should be fun to watch this when the 10 month competition gets started in January.
I mentioned in October that Storytlr was shutting down and would be releasing their software as open source. In a blog post on Sunday they announced the initial release with plans to continue working towards a stable 1.0 release over the next few weeks. Of note is that they released it under an Apache 2 license which means it’s non-restrictive and can be used for commercial endeavors. You can download the code now via Google Code here.
I echo the sentiments Christina Warren at Mashable wrote yesterday about the release.
The shuttering of hosted services is just one of those things that happens on the Internet. We like that StoryTlr gave its users advanced notice, made it easy to export their existing data and have now open sourced the platform so that individuals can build their own copies or even extend the idea.
2009 was a great year for designers creating custom Lifestreaming themes for Wordpress. I now list 15 such themes that are available.
Nythemes.com has selected their top 3 Lifestreaming themes for 2009.
From the post:
As every serious blogger is preaching right now, blogging has evolved to a new level – call it blogging 3.0 – the lifestream (at least at a personal level). This requires a theme where you have your Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr entries mixed together with blog posts for a complete experience of your personality.
First off I want to give credit to the title which I got from this tweet by Keith Crawford. If you follow the tech world you most probably saw the flurry of news that came from the LeWeb conference in France. I found the following post by David Spark to offer a great summary of it.
Queen Rania of Jordan offered the keynote where she used the term Lifestreaming several times in a talk calling out everyone to help use social media and the web for activism. Beyond the fact that this is the first royal figure to use the term Lifestreaming there isn’t any other relevence to me posting this. On the other hand, she does provide a nice compelling speech reminding us that we need to use these tools for good so I happy to help carry that message.
I have a custom search I use to monitor mentions of Lifestreaming on Twitter. Over the last few days I’ve seen an avalanche of automated tweets coming from users that have forced me to modify my search. See the stream for yourself here.
At first I thought this may be part of the recent Lifestream Sweepstakes they launched, which could be part of the influx, but apparently now when you add Twitter to your Lifestream in AIM it prompts you to send an automated Tweet letting users know about it.
I have to say I’m glad that AOL is really pushing their Lifestream inititive hard. They are probably poised better than anyone to help the concept reach the mainstream and by the looks of it, their users are joining in droves.
AOL has really been pushing their Lifestreaming efforts and has now upped the ante by tempting users with a free trip. They’ve created a custom domain and landing page for users to enter the sweepstakes. The download and installation of the AIM 7.1 client with Lifsetreaming is not a requirement to enter.
Details of the prize are pretty fuzzy. The page says it’s a “free spring break trip” but doesn’t provide much more details beyond that. I went to the official rules page to see if I could get more info but only found this:
GRAND PRIZE: One (1) Grand Prize Winner will receive a trip for four (4) to Grand Prize Winner’s destination of choice. The Grand Prize includes: i) four (4) roundtrip coach-class airfare for Grand Prize Winner and three (3) guests between a major metropolitan city airport in the US closest to the Grand Prize Winner’s residence and Grand Prize Winner’s chosen destination, and ii) hotel accommodations (one (1) standard room) at a hotel selected by Grand Prize Winner . Grand Prize winner will be able to choose their destination, hotel, and length of stay; however, the amount that will be awarded towards the retail purchase price of the Grand Prize trip will be no more than $3,900. Grand Prize will not exceed the total ARV value of $3,900. ARV may vary based upon Grand Prize Winner’s chosen destination, hotel accommodations, and length of stay, not to exceed a maximum of $3,900. Grand Prize Winner will be responsible for any cost above $3,900. Total Approximate Retail Value of the Grand Prize is $3,900.
So I guess you can spend spring break wherever $3900 will take you.
Twitpic used to be my primary method for posting photos from my iPhone. Several months ago I began researching ways that I could automatically post my iPhone images to multiple sites including Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed and Twitter. I looked into using Tarpipe, Pixelpipe, and several other services but none of them offered a simple workflow to do this. Then I discovered Posterous which I have found to be the easiest way to do this and have been very happy ever since.
Similarly to myself, today I came across this post that discusses one users migration from Twitpic to Posterous that I thought was worth sharing. One thing the author doesn’t discuss worth mentioning is that Posterous also offers an iPhone app with extended functionality for posting photos.
From the post:
I would call Posterous a “mini-blog platform”: just like Tumblr, it allows you to easily post and share your post amongst other users. The niche Posterous fills is that it automates shares your content amongst other social media services like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Vimeo, Blogger, Wordpress, Xanga and… Twitter.
Unlike Twitpic, Posterous is a blogging platform, so it allows me to customize the look and feel of “my” blog, but also allows me to use my own domain. So I thought: “How about using Posterous as an alternative for Twitpic?”…. And it works like a charm.
I have been mulling over a post recently on how to setup Twitter as your Lifestream by utilizing the feature that most social media sites now offer by linking your Twitter account to post content you create or like on those services.
Using Twitter as your main Lifestream is something you should think about before jumping right in. I personally use a large number of services and wouldn’t want to flood my tweetstream with the actions performed on all of them. I also am not comfortable setting mup too comfortable setting up too many services to autopost. I’ve seen some nightmare scenarios with regards to that. But if you think this through and link a handful it may be a good method to use.
So MakeUseOf.com beat me to the punch and wrote the following story that discusses just that. I may still put my spin on this method in the future.
From their post:
There are a few options that allow you to aggregate all of that content into a lifestream, such as FriendFeed, or for the more adventurous, there’s the self-hosted Sweetcron. But a lifestream isn’t any fun if no one is listening. Most of us have a few people who are interested in what we have to say in one place in particular – on Twitter.
So why make the extra effort of interacting with people on two separate websites, or attracting visitors to your self-hosted lifestream, when you can easily use a Twitter lifestream to share all your online content?
Nice post from The Next Web with information on Lifestreaming Service FriendBinder.com. Of note with the distinction from other services is the ability to search for keywords across the multiple services you have imported as well as a custom trending topics page built only based on your social graph.
From the post:
The combination of wide network harnessing and innovative information searching and management functions offers the potential for Friendbinder to become more than just a ‘me too’ liftesreamer. The mobile m.friendbinder.com version enables the service to be in your pocket at all times.
The biggest challenge for FriendBinder will be gaining and retaining users who may be apathetic to switching. Those that spend time using FriendBinder will find a rewarding experience that adds to the value of their existing social networks.
Amy had writers block on this day and sent out a tweet asking for a topic for her to write about. I won the challenge which resulted in the post below.
Mark was calling on me to refute a post I wrote several weeks ago asking what the big deal was about lifestreaming. That post generated a healthy discussion as readers tried to help me understand what value sites like Tumblr and Posterous added versus a traditional blog and other outlets like Facebook and Twitter. Mark, who authors the LifestreamBlog, left one of many great comments on the post.
Awesome development reported by Marshall Kirkpatrick about Cliqset pushing Lifestreaming (and the ActivityStreams) initiatives further along.
That means activities from all those services can be read in a common language and 3rd party services can slice and dice them to create new user experiences. Several high-profile applications have already begun consuming activity feeds republished through Cliqset and the company says many more consumers are in the works.
According to this post ICQ (who is owned by AOL) is also building Lifestreaming functionality.
As discovered by my friend macxylo, the ICQ Team seems to be working on copying AIM's Lifestream service to ICQ now. The settings page is already there and Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, ICQ, Twitter and YouTube integration already works as it can be seen on my Facebook Wall, too me on Facebook.
Nice blog re-design by Joe Stump using Wordpress and the WP-Lifestream Plugin
Whoa! What happend to the old site?! Well, after many years of rolling my own code, design, HTML, CSS, etc. I finally gave up and had some professionals take care of the hard parts. I’ve gave up rolling my own code in favor of using WordPress a while ago and am now using the Lifestream plugin for this site, which I hacked to bits.
A very long post with some interesting thoughts on privacy and other aspects of the content within our Lifestreams.
This has been on my mind ever since I started using Posterous as an annex space from this blog, instantly uploading pictures, sound files, stories, and videos from my phone. Where I would have had to wait until I returned home from a party or event, hooking my camera up to the computer, downloading and sizing the photos, slowly uploading them individually to my blog, they now are sent instantly and I return home with the whole night already blogged and commented on from people reading at home.
Lifestream blog provides the latest news, reviews and resources for the tools and services to create a Lifestream. It also provides information on the social services used to fuel them. You can follow author Mark Krynsky on:
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