A while ago I watched a video interview Robert Scoble did with the folks at Small Worlds. This is a new virtual world service that is being compared to Second Life. The difference here though is that it doesn’t require you to download a client and runs right within your browser.  They’ve also managed to create a very simple environment to navigate and interact with compared to many of the other services available.

So why am I writing about this? Well because they have tied in aspects of Lifestreaming in a whole new way that hasn’t been done by anyone else. This virtual world, like most others, has many of the familiar elements such as avatars, homes, and objects you can buy and put in your home. The difference here being that you can tie in social media services to your virtual objects.

Here is an image showing my home and several virtual objects with the associated services that are tied to them.

If you join Small Worlds, you can visit me here

Here are some details about the objects you see in my virtual world above

• The stereo is powered by my playlists at Last.fm
• The Plasma is powered by searches or playlists I create on YouTube
• The mural is powered by images I define from Flickr
• The painting is powered by my tweets from Twitter

But it’s very hard to demonstrate how innovative this service is in a static blog post with images so I’ve created a detailed screencast demonstrating these features for you below.

My Lifestreaming functionality demo in Small Worlds

Note that I uploaded this video in HD quality which is better viewed directly on YouTube here

As you can see this truly does offer a very new innovative way to share your Lifestream. It may not be the quickest or most streamlined way to do it, but definitely the coolest. Time will tell how this functionality plays out on Small Worlds but keep in mind this is just one small aspect of the service. There is a whole lot more going on here including games, missions, and plenty more that make this a must try for anyone interested in virtual worlds. They’ve even created an API that should provide some very interesting extensions for 3rd party developers.

One thing to keep in mind is the fact that the service is free to join and you need to earn gold to buy objects for your apartment. This can be done several ways including completing missions as well as purchasing with real world money.

It would be very cool and interesting to experiment using this with several other users in the room with me. Perhaps I can get a few of you guys to join and help me test that. If you create an account on the service leave a comment with your user details below. Perhaps I can schedule a time to invite you over for a virtual world meetup at my apartment.

Some additional resources to check out

• You can see the video interview Robert did here
• Information and review from BBGsite.com
• Review from TechPluto

I came across this very cool graphic of Social Web Services created several months ago by Brian Solis and JESS3. I’m not sure how I missed it, but glad I finally stumbled onto it. It’s a great representation of a subset of services broken down by category that can be used to create your Lifestream.

The Conversation Prism image courtesy of Brian Solis & JESS3

This image reminds me of how important it is to expose people and provide the details on all the ingredients available to create their perfect Lifestreaming recipe. I always wanted the “Define” section of this blog to act as that tool but haven’t really spent the time to do so. I’ve primarily been focused on covering the tools and services to create our Lifestreams and neglected this aspect which is just as important. I will make it a point to enhance that area soon.

Also in reading Brian’s post He discusses the creation of his personal Social Map. I had seen his and others and was inspired to create my own and thought I’d share it again. Take a look at my post where I provide tips for creating your own.

Mark Krynsky Social Map

Brian Solis Social Map

SocialMention.com is a newly released project built using Yahoo’s BOSS search platform . It was created by Jon Cianciullo who also created cluztr.com which I’ve written about previously.

It’s basically a search engine that allows you to search for people, or mentions of them, as well as any other keyword and get results from top social media sites including Twitter, FriendFeed, Delicious , Flickr, Digg, YouTube, coComment and more.

So let’s say you have friends that may use one or more social media services and you wanted to scour the web to find out everywhere they are either creating, or being mentioned across those services, this is your tool. You can get the whole enchilada in what merged feed, or you can filter by types of services (i.e. Microblogs, bookmarks, videos, etc…) using tabs.

In addition to web-based search results, Social Mention also plans on adding email alerts and personalized RSS feeds as features in the near future to provide automatic and instant updates. This is definitely a tool you should add to your social media arsenal.

Read more

• Mashable Review
• Startup Meme

I read about new service Pageonce over at bub.blicio.us today.

From the site:

There are dozens of lifestreaming apps out there now, but this is the first one I’ve come across that acknowledges that I’m an adult with cell phone bills, credit cards, and bank accounts. PageOnce aggregates your entire online life, from financials and utilities to Facebook and Twitter.

This new service has a slightly different spin in that it adds much more than social media services to the mix. They offer the ability to add financial, shopping, email, travel, and utility services as well.

I just briefly created an account to test it. They seem to offer support for quite a few social media services although some may shy away from their method of requiring passwords to add accounts. I’ve seen backlash in the past from services that require this especially if they don’t explain why they need it or provide additional value from the access.

You can also see from the image above that they have a predefined way of importing data from your social services. While the Twitter import is pretty cool, the Flickr one only brought in messages as opposed to my images which I don’t really care about and I didn’t see a way to define the data displayed.

The service also seems to be aimed as more of a start page on steroids than a Lifestreaming service. I didn’t see a way to share my “Social” streams page and it doesn’t offer adding friends to your network. Nonetheless I am a fan of aggregation sites that delve into other areas. I use Mint to aggregate my financial services and I will spend some more time playing with Pageonce to see how it compares.