image courtesy of Flickr user Bill Barber

The other day I got this email from a reader:

Hello,
I’m a big fan of your blog and lifestreaming in general. I was wondering if you could help me out. A very good friend of mine passed recently, and I wanted to create an online memorial, reflecting his online life. He was on many sites. I’ve tried using Sweetcron, however it will only pull info from the latest rss feeds. What I’m looking for is a service that allows you to login to many accounts and pulls information from the beginning.

Do you have any suggestions on a service that might do this? I thought sweetcron would be great, so I could set it to randomize the postings to keep the site more lively and less static, so that would be a great feature to have as well.

Much thanks for your help.

-Sean

I’ve given thought to and discussed using Lifestreams as archived memorials in the past but really have never explored methods on how to achieve it. I spent a little time thinking about this but didn’t feel like I really had a good answer for Sean.

Regardless, I wanted to give him some ideas nonetheless so I responded with this:

Sean,
I gave this some thought tonight and the problem you may encounter is that some sites may not provide a fully archived feed using the standard RSS url. I think it will vary depending on the service. If you come across feeds that don’t provide enough info, then you may want to contact the site to see if there is a way to get access to the full feed somehow. I can’t currently think of another way around that issue.

But if you have a complete feed over a long period of time, then you have a few options that I can think of right now:
http://storytlr.com is a service that is very nice and is the only one that I know of that offers the ability to create “story’s” where you can define services to pull in feed data as well as the start / end date. I’ve attached a screenshot for you to see what I mean.

Other than that you may also want to try one of the timeline based lifestreaming services such as http://allofme.com , http://lifeblob.com, http://dipity.com or http://dandelife.com . I have reviews of some of these here: http://lifestreamblog.com/create/ .

Hope this helps a little. If I come across anything else I’ll let you know.

Mark

Lifestreaming is still very much in its infancy but it is clear that it’s becoming the digital diary of the new millennium. My grandparents died when I was very young and I never got to hear them tell their story. All I have are photo albums and the stories from the rest of the family. How amazing would it be to have access to rich Lifestreams of our ancestors to hear about their lives in their own words? Well as more people begin adopting Lifestreaming, and the services get perfected to achieve this, I think Lifestream memorials will become a reality in the future.

Now I’ll say that I haven’t had a chance to give this too much more thought, but I wanted to just think out loud and share my thoughts with you on this. Perhaps some of you can provide insight or ideas in the comments on a recipe to achieve this with current tools, or perhaps a developer will read this and incorporate some of these ideas into an existing service or create a new one. I see this as something that will become a VERY important aspect of Lifestreaming in the future.

I see creating a memorial from a Lifestream posing a few challenges. As Sean stated, using the standard logic of a reverse chronological way to display the data just doesn’t work. I offered a few options, but none quite offer a great solution.

I see the following as some issues / features necessary to create a memorial:

1. Getting full data exports from the services used to create the Lifestream / Memorial
2. Providing the ability to curate (manually select) individual stream items into custom views (Timeline, calendar, events, etc.)
3. Ability to manually add items and inject them (timeframe-wise) anywhere into the Lifestream (photos, videos, documents, scans, etc)
4. Offer an online, offline, or combination of both ways to view the content
5. Support more than 1 person to create a Familystream

I’m sure I can think of more but just want to get the brain juices going. I think we have some of these features and functionality scattered across existing services on the web but nothing that combines them all cohesively for this type of application.

For the first issue of getting the data, I’m not sure how it could be accomplished as I think it’s dependent on the services the data is stored on and how easy it is to get access to it. In most cases simply supplying an RSS feed won’t cut it and every service will have its own unique method of getting a full data dump, if that’s even possible. Some current services that I can think of that exist that could be helpful here are Gnip, Lifestreambackup, Storytlr (offers exporting) and BackupMyTweets & BackupMyPics.

Most Lifestreaming services only offer the standard reverse chronological method of displaying data. As I mentioned in the email there are a few other options with Timeline based Lifestreaming services and Storytlr, but that’s not flexible enough for creating a Memorial.

There also isn’t the ability to manually add items (including from your local computer) with more control over parameters such as a specific date and time although a service I covered a while back that is still around and now open source called Dandelife had the ability to do it at the month/year level.

I also see a memorial app as needing an offline or local client version. There are many reasons for this including portability, distribution, using local assets, etc. The app would need to offer the ability to import from external services as well as use local assets. This makes me think of an app / service like Picasa which offers both online and offline components that can communicate with each other. I also believe Picasa has some of the curating functions as well.

Anyways, I find this topic very interesting and a new fork in the Lifestreaming road. I’m hoping it inspires someone to create something we can all use to do this in the future. While I’m on this subject I thought I’d also mention another relevant and thought provoking article written by Mike Fruchter titled What happens to our social profiles after we die? which touches similar issues that you may find interesting

UPDATE:
I didn’t mention ThisMoment which is another “timeline based” Lifestreaming service that also has some nice features that could be used to create a memorial. You can also find reviews of them on Webware, Mashable, and ReadWriteWeb.

One of the features I’ve always wanted from a Lifestream is a calendar feature. What I’d like to see would be a standard calendar UI to be able to navigate and drill down through a Lifestream. This would offer the ability to easily find dates and ranges that I’d want to look for. This would be good for finding trips, birthdays, or to see what we documented for other milestones that occur in our lives.

So I decided to do a quick mockup of what this feature might look like if it was built for FriendFeed. I borrowed the Google calendar and then just dropped in some ways that you could navigate through it. I chose the full month view which would primarily offer text links, but perhaps the weekly view could offer some nice thumbnail visualizations of data.

My mockup of a possible FriendFeed Calendar UI

Sure there are great timeline based Lifestreaming services such as Dipity, Lifeblob, Allofme, but they don’t offer the standard UI I’m looking for. Now defunct service Swurl had a somewhat nice Calendar view but I’d want more from one than they offered. My custom Lifestream built using Life2front offers another interesting timeline view, but once again not a standard calendar UI. Hopefully this feature will be either added by FriendFeed or another service soon as I think many would really appreciate the calendar metaphor for navigation.

Today AOL owned Bebo social networking service released their initial implementation of Lifestreaming features to the service. This functionality was brought in after AOL’s purchase of Lifestreaming service SocialThing and I’m sure also based on features created for their buddyupdates service. Several sites have covered the news portion of the annoncement (links below) but I’m here to provide you with details of what’s actually under the hood. Since I wasn’t a Bebo user, I thought I’d provide a first hand look at these new features for you.

Getting Started

Upon visiting the site I went to create a new account and filled in all the standard information needed. After that I headed straight to the new Lifestreaming functionality. The steps to create your Lifestream and view it aren’t totally intuitive and took a minute to find from the profile page so I’ve added the screenshot below with steps to take to help you create one.

• Step 1 shows where you need to navigate to edit your Lifestream
• Step 2 shows where you click to add services to your Lifestream
• Step 3 shows where you have to convert to the new profile system which is required to view the “Lifestory” functionality everyone is reporting

The initial set of services supported is limited to Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, and competing networks Facebook and MySpace. The Facebook integration simply brings over your status messages and photos. I added it for testing, but since I sync my Twitter status to Facebook and primarily use Flickr for photos I later removed it. Even after removing though, the items imported remained with no way to delete them. The MySpace integration only brings over blog posts.

The Lifestory feature is supposed to be a timeline based Lifestream similar to the current crop of services like dipity, Allofme, thismoment & Lifeblob. It’s design and function is nice, but the problem is that it’s limited to actions on the Bebo network and doesn’t incorporate your data from the services you import. You can manually add an item with photo and link along with a date to your Lifestory, but this is rudamentary compared to other services in this space. I think they should have waited for Lifestreaming support before releasing as the current version is lacking.

Sharing your Lifestream

By default your profile (and Lifestream) will be private. You need to make your profile public which will then provide a url based on your username which you can then share. First off I didn’t like the automated username of MarkK316 which Bebo automatically assigned to me. To change it I navigated to the Settings->My Account and under Account Details I clicked on Change Username. After that you go to Settings->Privacy and change the radio button under Profile viewable by my friends only to everyone. Then go back to your profile page and you will see the URL of your profile listed under your profile picture. Mine is bebo.com/Krynsky

Bebo vs. Facebook

We knew Bebo was working on adding a richer Lifestream experience and while they have taken a different approach by making it prominent as opposed to Facebook who buries theirs, the experience appears to be cobbled together by various different teams which makes for a disjointed experience. Also, the current support of services and features is a little weak. Hopefully they will add more services and gradually refine the functionality because it’s currently a little light and not compelling enough for users to switch. Only time will tell.

News of Bebo’s Lifestreaming announcement elsewhere

• ReadWriteWeb - Bebo Now Emphasizes Lifestreaming – Updates Profile Pages
• BoomTown - AOL Socializes Even More With New Lifestream
• Mashable - Bebo Wants to Be Your Social Aggregator
• TechCrunch - Bebo Zeroes In On Lifestreaming For The Masses; Gets Massive Bump From AIM Profiles
• VentureBeat - AOL takes one part Bebo, one part AIM, wants to create central lifestreaming service

I wrote about Allofme.com a while back. It’s another entrant in the new niche timeline based Lifestreaming services. They join dipity and Lifeblob in this space. I recently was provided an invite and thought I’d go kick the tires on the service.

I went through the account creation process and noticed that one unique feature is the ability to upload a variety of different file types from your local computer to add to the timeline. Filetypes supported are jpg, gif, png, pdf, txt, doc, docx, ppt, pps, and xls. You can also manually add links or images as well as videos from over 25 supported sites.

This freedom makes it interesting to be more creative with respect to what you create. I like the idea and can see how it can expand the possibilities.

They also provide the more common ability of importing data from your services. They are currently limited to Picasa, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter with Facebook and Google Calendar coming soon.

I didn’t spend too much time trying to create my own timeline but have provided one that you can look at below.

After playing with the UI and some of the features I can see they’ve created a very nice service and worthy entrant into the Timeline based services.

Some of the features I liked best are:

• Ability to tag items in timeline
• Clicking on a “batch” of photos and navigating the zoom window (see image below)
• Local display of images with extended data
• Timeline collaboration with other users
• Full screen view
• Ability to overlay 2 timelines
• The slick interface
• Themed timeline videos and widgets

That last one gets the bonus super cool award and worth the price of admission. To view this in action click on this link, then look for the link at the bottom of the page that says “Play Timeline / Export Widget” and click it, then cycle through the themes. Not all were available yet, but it will be nice to see them when released.

Overall this looks like a well thought out and designed service and a solid beta worth trying out…and lucky for you, I’ve been provided with 100 invites for Lifestream Blog readers. Just visit this page and signup now.

Read More

• My previous story on Allofme
• Mashable Review

Allofme.com is a new service that is currently in Alpha that has entered the Timeline based form of Lifestreaming. It appears to be similar to previous services I’ve covered dipity and LifeBlob and even Dandelife to some degree. I have yet to try the service as I don’t have an account, but they provide several interesting timelines available for view on the current site. The examples are history, sport, and pop culture driven and provide a very large and visually rich looking timeline. I especially enjoyed the Life Magazine timeline.

There aren’t any personalized timelines available for viewing, although a teaser on the site claims that is coming soon with the ability to import digital assets , such as pictures, videos, blogs, documents, or any internet page. The image above taken from their site allows us to glean somewhat into possible services that will be supported such as YouTube, Twitter, Picasa, and Flickr as well as personal documents.

Below is also a very well produced and catchy video teaser for the service

This looks interesting and worth checking out when they open up. You can register on the site to become a beta tester.