This is a 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

Lately, with the release of new software and updated web services, I’ve seen a blurring of what defines a lifestream. This is not a bad thing, and it indicates the impact of lifestreams on one’s online experience and the direction the current web culture is taking. What does get confusing is the use of the term lifestream to cover many different uses, each not exactly similar to the other. But essentially these uses can fall into two categories: Lifestreaming and Socialstreaming (a term I’ve accepted, although different terms have been attributed to this).

I do not have a hard definition for Lifestreaming, but what I’ve come to understand defines lifestreaming—in the online sense—as thus: the collection of one’s activity on various services (i.e. online life),  often arranged by time, into one central location. This is seen due to lifestreaming services will take all (or most) of your online activity and place that activity into one spot. Visiting Lifestream Blog’s Create page you’ll find a host of services that do just that. If I could recommend a couple that can get you setup rapidly: Profilactic, Storytlr, and Iminta.

The other camp has a subtle difference, but this difference has a huge impact on what it means. The process I’m dubbing Socialstreaming is defined this way: the collection of other people’s activity on various services (i.e. online lives), often arranged by time, into one central location. As seen, the difference lies with the original sources being yourself or a gathering of this information from your social contacts. A simple way of looking at socialstreaming is the gathering of your contacts lifestreams into a easily viewable place.

The two thoughts are based in the same spirit, but the most obvious difference is that a lifestream is made to publish all your activity for the benefit of others, while a socialstream is primarily personal to you. You don’t necessarily want to publish all your friends activity for everyone else to see, it’s a bit redundant. I’d say a chief socialstreaming service right now is FriendFeed. I call FriendFeed a socialstreaming services with solid lifestreaming features. A more recent development in the socialstreaming field is the release of the Skimmer desktop client. Skimmer labels itself as a lifestreaming application, but actually grabs your social connection’s activity and blends it with your own. The fact that Skimmer is not built around publishing all the information it collects and is built for your benefit, places it solidly under the socialstreaming definition.

Things like these examples blur the line as to what a lifestream truly is. I believe that the aggregation of people’s lifestreams will ultimately overtake the popularity of the internet’s current craze: Twitter. I believe Facebook sees this trend as well with their latest site design. Lifestreams will become the faucet where people’s lives are released, and services like FriendFeed, Facebook, and others will be the piping that gathers this information and directs it specifically to you…your stream of lifestreams…your socialstream.

It’s just my opinion, do you agree?

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