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.

For the past couple weeks I’ve been trying out a news lifestreaming service called Nebul.us (currently in private beta).  Nebul.us offering is an easy way to share online content with friends based on your browsing history. By tracking your online activity, Nebul.us  will show your friends the information you single out and provides a very simple hub for posting information.

Behind Nebul.us is a Firefox plugin (Safari and Internet Explorer plugins coming soon) that tracks your online activity. The plugin will share this information with Nebul.us where then you can move into Nebul.us and choose which of these you’d like to make public. Yeah, that’s right. It logs all your browsing history and delivers it to Nebul.us…more on that later. Another way of sharing is setting up sites for Nebul.us to monitor like Last.fm, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, RSS, etc.

The Skinny

Nebul.us is beautiful. It displays the content you share in a beautiful graphical “cloud”. Information is shown around a central piece with status updates, videos, articles, etc. shown around it. Nebul.us separates the categories to share into 5 categories: Articles, Music, Photos, Updates, and Videos. The cloud allows friends a simple and elegant way to view what other people are sharing by placing each item in easily identifiable flags and usage bars. The flags identify simple updates (status updates, specifically shared articles, etc.) and the bars show length of time. Whether it is length of time spent on a specific website or length of a song.

image courtesy of useallfive.com *

Nebul.us is an interesting concept. Sort of a merge between a Wakoopa for websites and Pownce for sharing. It can monitor your web usage and share that information if you let it. And it makes sharing updates, videos, links, and music very easy.

Wait, it Monitors What?

Like I said, the Nebul.us shoots your everywhere you browse to the Nebul.us private history. This isn’t automatically shared, but it is visible. I found some items like my bank site usage, email usage, and my cable provider’s account. This is a bit scary out of the box. Another key thing is that in my testing I found that Nebul.us still logs all the sites I visited while using Firefox’s Private Browsing. This I think is unacceptable from the plugin, or should be identified as such out of the box.

You can setup blocked sites for Nebul.us. Going into the settings and telling the plugin which sites to ignore is doable, but it requires the user to be proactive in blocking. Making sites trusted is also required in the settings, which is how it should be. I don’t know how Nebul.us can correct for these issues moving forward, but it is a bit complicated to handle. I may be in the minority these days when it comes to privacy, but this steps a little beyond my comfort zone.

I like Nebul.us in concept, but I have to admit I can’t see myself using it regularly. I also have a feeling it will not receive wide usage due to the fact that it doesn’t just work out of the box. I’ve never been a big fan of sites that require browser plugins. StumbleUpon was the one site that proved browser plugin sites could work, but times have changed and so has StumbleUpon (which has a toolbar that don’t require a browser plugin anymore). And in this age of Twitter, things as complicated as installing a plugin, setting up trusted sites, remembering all of your blocked sites, then handling the sharing; I cannot see Nebul.us gaining much traction. Which is a shame because like I said it’s beautiful and fun to look at. If I were to give any advice to Nebul.us it’d be, drop the plugin and expand your monitored site selection. Then use a bookmarklet for easy sharing beyond what’s monitored. At the very least, drop the browser history monitoring and have every site be blacklisted unless explicitly selected as trusted. (Ok, I’ll step off my soapbox now.)

I have 15 invites for anyone that wants to check it out. Let me know in the comments.

* image from useallfive.com because their image is better than anything I could screen grab

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.