The annual pilgrimage to SXSW is upon us once again. Last year was my first time there and I had an amazing time. This year I feel a bit more prepared and plan to take full advantage of what I learned. If you’re new this year, or just want some good tips, ReadWriteWeb has created a handy list. There were plenty of complaints around coverage for iPhones but I’ve read that AT&T says their network will be ready this year. If that’s the case then you better make sure you’re prepared for the overtime usage your phone will be getting. I’ve purchased 2 iPhone 2200 mAh backup battery packs at Monoprice.com (sorry, can’t link to product page since site is down). These work great and are only $14 each. I recommend you seek a similar option for your mobile phone as well.

The SXSW website has created a nice personal scheduling section this year along with an iPhone app but I do still like the Sched.org version which offers some additional features as well as showing who else is attending panels and more. Also be sure to check out the new service by Sitby.us which aims to help you let your friends know which and exactly where you’ll be sitting at panels.

So there were 5 panels with some form of Lifestreaming proposed (one of which I was on) but unfortunately none of them got selected. Kind of a bummer since social media aggregation has really become such a dominating strategy for even the big players now. I still was able to look at the panels and find a few that are worthy of attending if you feel as letdown as I had.

Here are a few Lifestream related panels worth considering

• ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? – This appears to be a primer on what has become the leading Lifetreaming open standard adopted by many.
• Gmail: Behind the Scenes – Some of the engineers and product managers behind Google Buzz will be talking here.
• Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized? – Judging by some of the panelists there may be some Lifestreaming nuggets strewn across their talk.
• The Life Graph: You Are Your Location – While sounding like an LBS talk the description mentions what could be some interesting topics around Lifestream data.
• Time + Social + Location. What’s Next In Mobile Experiences? – Description a bit vague but may offer something interesting.
• Engines of Sociality: 2010 and Beyond – “…transformative technologies and paradigms on the horizon in 2010 that will power the new augmented sociality, including the social filtering, personalization, and contextualization of real-time messaging.” Could be interesting.
• Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web & Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends & also Search Patterns: Tangible Futures for Discovery – May offer some thoughts on Lifestream data and search.
• 2010: The Year We Broadcast Our Credit Card – Thoughts on Lifestreaming and privacy.

So as you can see there’s still a few topic based talks that should offer some insight into were Lifestreaming is today and where it may be going. Last year there was also an Activity Streams meetup at the end of one of the days and I’ve heard they’re planning another one. Also, I’ll be attending the Mashable party which is being sponsored by the very good Cliqset Lifestreaming service.

But I also know that many of these discussions will also occur in the hallways where I had many good ones last year. In fact last year I was glad to have met many great people including readers of this blog whom I talked to about Lifestreaming. I look forward to more of the same this year so if you happen to see me wandering around please say hello. You can check out my profile on the SXSW site or on Sched.org so that we can connect. You can also see many places I’ll be headed to on Plancast or better yet stalk me on FourSquare, Gowalla, or Brightkite along with Twitter.

It was at the LA 140Conf where I first heard about how MySpace was really focusing heavily on Lifestreaming. They have continued to push forward on this path and amidst the departure of Monica Keller, who was the catalyst for delivering it, they keep moving forward.

I saw over on TechCrunch that MySpace has apparently quietly unleashed Streams (what they’re calling their Lifestreaming feature) onto profile pages. They’re doing this quietly without a formal announcement perhaps to see how it performs, is received, and if any problems are encountered (take note Google re: Buzz).

Below I’ve taken a screenshot of my page highlighting some of the features

From the TechCrunch Post

The idea is to hit users over the head with new stuff when they come to MySpace. New people they should be meeting. Movie trailers they should watch. Games they may want to play perhaps against other MySpace users, music they should listen to, articles they should read. Etc. The activity stream that MySpace recently launched will be the backbone of Discovery, but other MySpace products will feed into this as well.

Then after hearing about this release I read over at Billboard that MySpace has quietly begun testing a new “In-Stream” ad unit which will be placed at the bottom of these new stream pages. So apparently this rollout seems to have been released tied to a monetization strategy from the beginning. This will be interesting to monitor as it’s the first time I’ve seen an ad strategy released around a Lifestream.

Today I discovered that Laurent Eschenauer & Alard Weisscher, co-founders of the popular Storytlr Lifestreaming service, have embarked on a very ambitious new project. Storytlr ceased development and was released as open source last December and today we apparently find out why. They’ve now taken on a much larger problem of building a ” free, open, and decentralized social networking platform” called One Social Web.

Here’s their description

The purpose of onesocialweb is to enable free, open, and decentralized social applications on the web. Its protocol can be used to turn any XMPP server into a full fledged social network, participating in the onesocialweb federation. The suite of extensions covers all the usual social networking use cases such as user profiles, relationships, activity streams and third party applications. In addition, it provides support for fine grained access control, realtime notification and collaboration.

I read a little further to find out that this project is an initiative of Vodafone Group Research and Development which you can learn about more from the link. Laurent and Alard have also  stated that they are very much open to suggestion and feedback from anyone that wants to contribute to this project. My guess is that with their proven track record and the fact that this platform is being built around other open initiatives such as Activity Streams, portablecontacts, OAuth, OpenSocial, FOAF, XRDS, OpenID, and others, they should receive some good support.

Communicating across the disjointed social web is the problem One Social Web is trying to solve

When I think about how this system would work I look back at how SocialThing did things like where they would import activity from your friends from the sources of the social media services they lived on and allowed you to interact with them without requiring them to join SocialThing. I always liked that approach which nobody since then has tried to emulate and now it appears we have a new initiative aiming to bring us just that with open standards to boot.

On the day after Google announces Buzz and yet another social network we need to pay attention to I’m looking forward to watching the progress of One Social Web to create a decentralized and federated way of helping us connect the dots and make things easier to manage instead of adding to the pile.

They plan on the first release of the code to happen in March. You can learn much more about this project by visiting their site and viewing some of the materials I’ve embedded below.

Why One Social Web?

Screencast of Web Client

FOSDEM 2010 Presentation

I saw today that they have now posted some of the dates and times for the interactive panels for this years’ SXSW conference. Of particular interest to me is a panel being run by new Googler Chris Messina on Activity Streams. He will be speaking on Saturday 3/13 at 9:30 am with location still unannounced.

If my experience as a SXSW newbie last year is any indication it will be a wee difficult climbing out of bed that early but for myself it will no doubt be worth it. I look forward to seeing many of you Lifestream Blog readers that day at Chris’ panel.

Here’s the details from the site:

From Facebook’s newsfeed to Twitter’s relentless real-time updates, the metaphor of the “stream” has taken social networking beyond blog posts and on to rich social activities. Learn about ActivityStrea.ms – the open format adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Windows Live – and how it’s fundamentally changing the social web.

You can view the details here and be sure to take the time to create your personal schedule and add this panel to it.

In 2009 FriendFeed continued their dominance as the clear leader in the social streaming* space. But in the middle of the year when they were acquired by Facebook, their future path was largely in question and many users began seeking alternative services. FriendFeed has a pretty devoted community and while many continue to still use the service they are keeping an eye on any up and coming alternatives.

(*Social Streaming is the aggregation of multiple users’ Lifestreams with a community built around it to foster discussion)

Cliqset has become one of the top services now mentioned as a possible FriendFeed alternative and users appear to be watching them closely. Today they launched a slew of changes that continue shaping themselves as a premier social streaming service.

They’ve re-designed the UI quite a bit making changes that provide a simpler and more straightforward experience. It also paved the way for some of the functionality to snap neatly into place which includes several great additions.

File sharing is now available that also offers features within the service depending on the file type. For instance MP3’s will provide an in-line player once uploaded.

Groups functionality has been added which now offers niche based areas to be created which are isolated and separate from the regular user streams. These can be used to create areas that revolve around hobbies, brands, or any other niche you can imagine creating a custom stream for.

I see both of these features as evolutionary that now gets them closer to the standard feature set offered by FriendFeed and I’ll need to play with them some more to identify any distinguishing differences or nuances that make them different but these are important additions that helps get them up to par.

The feature which is unique to them and the coolest in my opinion for this release is their Streams. This allows you to create a custom filter that allows you to dial it in by Activity Type (blogs, photos, bookmarks, etc.)  Users, and Services. This feature helps set them up for what I feel is one of social streaming’s biggest challenges which is to fine tune the meaningful content we want to see on a daily basis from the mountain of data coming in. This is a nice first step but I look forward to watching this evolve with some automated logic.

They’ve also updated their Air client which although I haven’t tried yet, co-founder Darren Bounds gave me a demo and it looked pretty cool allowing a nice customizeable drag and drop column based interface that offered a way to organize the streams a little more effectively than the web app. And if you fancy yet another way to consume your streams they also released a fresh new Firefox extension as well. As if that’s not enough there’s also support for Boxee now!

Louis Gray calls Cliqset the “Swiss army knife for Web service updates” and with all these new tools it’s easy to see why. But although these updates are all front-end consumer facing Cliqset has also done everything they can to implement open standards across the board within their platform including using Activity Streams and leveraging Pubsubhub. ReadWriteWeb also wrote about the efforts with their FeedProxy release to enable developers to take advantage of their platform.

I feel that as technology continues to march on over the next year and FriendFeed not actively being devloped, Cliqset is in a great position. With their eyes focused on building an open standards based platform that is developer friendly, offering real-time updates functionality, and continuing to release features to easily share and create discussions around streaming content, Cliqset is on a path towards becoming the new king of social streaming services.

If you’re already on Cliqset or going to join, you can connect with me on here.

You can read more on Cliqset’s release

• Cliqset Upgrades Aggregator with Groups, Activity Streams – Louis Gray
• Cliqset Update Includes File Sharing and a Firefox Plugin – Mashable (Christina Warren)
• FriendFeed Clone Cliqset Upgrades Real-Time Platform With Sharing, Groups And Firefox Add-On – TechCrunch (Leena Rao)