Mark Philpot spent quite a bit of time testing several different Lifestreaming apps including Sweetcron, Kakuteru, and a few other custom scripts. He ended up being fairly happy with the Lifestream plugin for Wordpress but wanted to create a more customizable view. So he decided to write some custom PHP code to do just that.

Click image to view Mark’s Lifestream using this script

His code utilizes the Lifestream plugin for Wordpress to pull data stored by it in the Wordpress database. Then he’s added quite a few nice features:

• Attractively display your lifestream by event type
• Supports jQuery plugin imgPreview for posts with a thumbnail entry in the feed
• Supports jQuery plugin lightbox for Flickr images
• Supports ContentFlow (Cover Flow implementation) to display vi.sualize.us images
• Supports AJAX retrieval of more history for each event type

He’s provided the source code for it here and you can read more about it here.

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.)

via Facebook Patents The News Feed | All Facebook.

Update: there’s a much more detailed post on ReadWriteWeb here with a good discussion on it here. Thanks to Mahendra Palsule for the tip.

Below is video of a presentation from DrupalCamp Dallas in which Randall Knutson provided insight into what Lifestreaming is and then shows how to create one using Drupal. The method Randall uses to create a Lifestream in Drupal is by using the Feed API module. Coincidentally I too have spent a good deal of time recently implementing this module for the X PRIZE website and also did a quick talk on it at the LA Drupal meeting this month (video should be available in the future).

The video is just shy of an hour and unfortunately the camera is focused on Randall as opposed to the projector which he appears to be using to show much of the process. Still it is worth listening to if you are interested in learning more about Lifestreaming and Drupal.

Randall also created a slide presentation which is available on Google Docs here.

While Feed API is a very powerful and flexible module, there is a simpler alternative for creating a Lifestream using Drupal. Be sure to also look at the Activity Stream Module written by Adam Kalsey which was designed specifically to create a Lifestream. It comes with support for a slew of services out of the box with the ability to create additional ones as well. Below is a screencast that shows how to install, configure, and use the module.

This is the first 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

In a sea of lifestreaming services, UnHub tries to distinguish itself from the other services by offer a simple portal into your online life. UnHub is a brand new player to the lifestreaming market that started out of inspiration from the Skittle’s brand experiment that used social media websites as its primary website.

The Gist

Unlike other lifestreaming services out there that aggregate your data into one common place, UnHub simply adds an iframe bar above all your online services with links that point to the services you add. Anyone can create an account—for anybody. Here’s Barack Obama’s UnHub as well as My (Trae Blain) UnHub. The service is extremely lightweight since it does not actually grab any of your data, but merely points people to the location of that data.

TechCrunch points out that this is a great tool for businesses that participate in social media, as illustrated in this Josie’s Restaurant Unhub. Personal and business use will also be fond of the simple analytics feature that is included with the service to see what links are clicked and what links nobody cares about.

In Practice

Usage is fairly easy. It asks you what services you use and what are the links to the profiles for those services. UnHub appears to support a large number of services (which would be expected with a service with such little overhead), 57 in fact. After creating an account you are asked for an email and password to associate with the account which allows you to view the Analytics feature. Each UnHub address requires a landing page to start with, and can easily be selected with the Home check box.

UnHub also allows for the selection of websites outside of the supported 57, although those sites won’t include a favicon in the top bar. UnHub is a nice service that can be leveraged by people/companies that want to use something like Twitter searches or any number of personal sites for their UnHub group.

Not all Peachy

UnHub does have its set of issues. Due to Twitters setup, UnHub does not work directly with it. Instead it substitutes Tweetree for Twitter updates profile viewing. Tweetree has a nice interface, but it’s not Twitter and could turn heavy Twitter users off to its use. Also, there’s no way to style your UnHub Bar. My UnHub uses a meager 15 services (only 26% of the ones offered) and the bar tends to push the other service’s content under the crease, Especially on low resolution monitors. Also, adding new services can be a chore. The “supported” services do not simply ask for your username and then it finds the appropriate link, the actual url must be entered into the form. Remembering some of these and tracking them down can sometimes be a pain. Also after the initial setup, you can only add one service at a time. It would be much easier to add multiple links before having to save the page.

To Sum it Up

UnHub offers a nice service that I believe many people would prefer in things like email signatures. UnHub provides the benefit of sending people directly to the content’s location (save Twitter), instead of aggregating it all into one place. It is a different approach to lifestreaming that some will find preferable over other methods commonly used today.

I saw over at Woo Themes that they have recently released the Irresistible premium Wordpress theme for FREE. This theme took 4th place of the top 10 themes selected from a contest that Woo Themes ran last year. The designer, Izuddin Helmi also won 1st place with another submission.

This theme caught my eye very quickly as it is both styled and has functionality specifically catered to a Lifestreamer. I thought this theme looked so great that I had to try it out and write a review.

Before I get into the details take a look at the screenshot of the theme below after I installed it and plugged in all my data.

Click for a cleaner image

Not sure you feel the same way I do, but this theme struck me immediately as being really nice visually and breaking out the content in a unique way that I really hadn’t seen before. I feel it’s a clean fresh look that works well to bring your Lifestream to a blog. The image above shows the custom homepage option which provides small excerpts from blog posts and includes the Lifestreaming components. There is also another traditional homepage you can set it to use that displays full posts with images and utilizes a standard single sidebar on the right.

So now I’ll get into the setup and options. After copying over the theme and selecting it you have several things you need to configure to get your homepage and content setup properly. There is a dedicated options page to make this a pretty simple process. The myPhotos section is pulled in by providing your Flickr user account information. Flickr appears to be the only service supported for this section. myLifestream requires that you install and configure the great Lifestream Wordpress plugin by David Cramer available here. You have the ability to set the number of items you want displayed on the homepage for blog posts, photos, and Lifestream items. The myVideos section has a unique way of pulling in your latest videos. Simply create a new post and copy the embed code into a custom field that is added by the theme and then simply use the tag video which sets a flag for it to be placed on the homepage. Unlike photos, you don’t have to define a specific service and it appears to support many different video services.

So beyond all the Lifestreaming options I just pointed out, there are some other great features included in the theme options:

• There is support for 9 different color schemes all controlled via a dropdown that simply selects a different CSS file to use. The colors include blue, brown, gray, green, pink, purple, red, teal, and yellow
• You have a dedicated field to create an about section which appears on the home page with a link to read more on a dedicated page
• You can use a custom logo
• You can provide the code for your Google Analytics and Feedburner accounts
• A section for placing ad or other banners on your site
• A sidebar widget that pulls in latest posts and comments and displays a tag cloud
• …and several other options to tweak the theme

3 of the 9 total color schemes available

As if that wasn’t enough you also get the full PSD file that has an extensive breakdown of all elements used so you can customize the design even further if you wish to. I have to say that this is the most impressive Lifestreaming theme I have seen or Wordpress yet and I’m tempted to use it for my personal site despite the fact I just spent a ton of time customizing another one I switched to recently. I highly recommend taking a look and tinkering with this theme to see if it may be right for you.

You can get all the details and download the Irresistible theme on the Woo Themes site here and get a live demo here.