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

I found out yesterday that Swurl.com has shut down. Swurl isn’t the first Lifestreaming service to go the way of go dark. They join several others which I update on my Lifestreaming services listing page. But in this case it was a little surprising considering that the service received quite a bit of fanfare when they launched just 8 months ago. They received coverage from many major sites including ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, Webware, Lifehacker, and Somewhat Frank.  My review of the service is here.

If you visit the site now you get a message that basically states the creators just don’t have time to maintain the site anymore. This is understandable but they could have done a better job warning users. An email several weeks before shutting down,  giving active users lead time prior to the closure would have been nice. This would have been a thoughtful gesture since at the end of the announcement they promote two other sites of theirs.

The closure brings up a few things to keep in mind when choosing a Lifestreaming or any other web service for that matter. Besides the bummer of losing a service you chose to be your Lifestraming home, there can be many other issues to be concerned with that will require refactoring in this web world of intertwined services and mashups.

From a Lifestreaming perspective you are probably for the most part importing your content from other services but there are still some areas where you may have content you want that was created natively on the service. Posts made directly, comments, bookmarked items,  friendship / follower data and more. If no warning is given, and no options to export information are available, you appear to pretty much be SOL.

This is probably one of the biggest arguments and reasons why we need Data Portability. I won’t get into those details (as I’ve covered it before) but it’s an important concept that will hopefully become adopted in some form soon.

So beyond the loss of content, Lifestreaming services also can be a bit more complicated than other sites because we may have a workflow that is fully dependent on them. For instance I sync my Twitter status to Facebook and I publish my FriendFeed posts to Twitter. Those are just two examples but nowadays many people have some pretty complicated workflows where they use a source service to move or sync data amongst various other services (fodder for another post I need to write). So with the loss of a Lifestreaming service you may need to remap your workflow.

Lastly, if you are using either embeddable widgets or scripts that pull data via API to your own blog. Those will now not function. For that matter any other 3rd party tools such as browser addons, third party sites or apps that worked with the service will also come to a screeching halt. Can you imagine if Twitter shut down? There is a whole cottage industry that has formed on the back of them that would suddenly disappear.

Anyways, I just wanted to provide some important things for you to think about along this topic.  As Chris Jobling thoughtfully pointed out regarding the shutdown, “don’t get too attached to a single Web 2.0 service! In the current economic climate, there’ll be a few that fall by the wayside”. Wise words to live by as I unfortunately think he’s right.

UPDATE: Two more Lifestreaming services are struggling. I guess it’s a sign of the times.

• Dandelife is moving to open source
• Profilactic is looking for a buyer

2008 has been a tremendous year for Lifestreaming. When I first began researching Lifestraming back in February of 2007 and then started this blog a month after there were only a few scripts available to create a Lifestream and not a single web service dedicated to them. Since then I have found over 50 services as well as tons of scripts and plugins to host your own. It has clearly become one of the hottest concepts to take off on the web. Here are some of this years highlights.

Lifestreaming is Wired!

I started the year with a post titled Will 2008 Bring Lifestreaming to the Masses. Wired had just released an issue with their usual expired/tired/wired list in which Lifestreaming made an appearance. A few days later Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb wrote a Lifestreaming Primer that gave a quick overview and featured 5 services to create a Lifestream. A little over a month later Josh Catone posted 35 Ways to Stream Your Life which built on Richard’s post and provided a huge boost. ReadWriteWeb would continue to be a leading voice on the Lifestreaming front along with plenty of coverage from Mashable, TechCrunch, Webware and plenty more.

FriendFeed breaks out as the leading service

Early in the year several Lifestreaming services were still jockeying for position without a clear leader in the space. That seemed to all change in March when Just a few weeks after FriendFeed had opened up to the public and TechCrunch had featured them as this years Twitter. Mark Rizzin of Mashable provided his thoughts as did Rafe Needleman over at Webware. Louis Gray who was an early adopter provided a list of Elite Bloggers that were joining in droves. Most of these people and many more are now regular users of the service. And finally Robert Scoble has become its leading Evangelist providing the values of the service often throughtout the year and recently recorded a lengthy video to show you.

I have covered many services this year but feel that FriendFeed has clearly made its way to the forefront. One may point to many different reasons for this. Be it the slew of new features, the reliability and speed, the search, or most importantly the release of an API. But I feel that the primary reason most people, including myself, have made it such a frequent destination is the community of users that it has garnered. I have met some really great people, have discovered content, and have participated in some great conversations across a multitude of topics. Its this dynamic interactive community that has led it to the top.

Lifestreaming services become acquisition targets

In late 2007 Google snapped up Jaiku. While some felt it was a play to get get a micro-blogging service to counter Twitter, I heard from several insiders that they had specific interest in the Lifestreaming aspects of the service. In April I discovered Lifestream.fm and was fairly impressed by the service launching with a good set of features immediately to public beta. Some immediately questioned their viability to compete with FriendFeed but just a few weeks later it was announced that they had been acquired by Mister Wong. Another service which was a darling of SXSW and also drew comparisons to FriendFeed (which I found distinct differences in and wrote about) was SocialThing. They continued to get major press and comparisions which led to an eventual purchase from AOL in August.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and AOL all added Lifestreaming initiatives in 2008

Not to be left behind and seeing the writing on the wall (or walled garden as the case may be) all of the top web companies initiated some sort of Lifestreaming plan this year. I mentioned Google’s acquisition of Jaiku , but they seem to have let it flounder and have pursued other methods to break into Lifestreaming. Most notably they have done this by expanding the Google user profile pages to display data and other services (see my post on this) as well as the release of Friend Connect. Microsoft and Yahoo have also put their Lifestreaming plans in play with new features added to their Windows Live service and the launch of a social control panel respectively. Facebook slowly rolled out several incremental Lifestreaming features to their newsfeed but it’s a bit hidden and doesn’t appear to be doing a major push of it. Lastly I had reported on AOL’s entrance into Lifestreaming with the release of buddyupdates. Just weeks after that the announcement of the SocialThing acquisition came. For the trifecta they also made Lifestreaming front and center on their home page. I think it’s clear that all the major players see the importance of Lifestreaming for their future and are all trying to figure out how to best implement it. I’m sure we will see many more advances from each of them in the year to come.

Lifestreaming to Replace Blogging?

click for YongFook's Slideshow

Wired printed an article titled Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 which essentially discussed the new breed of Lifestreaming that is taking over blogging. The story garnered a large debate with 97 comments at last count. Wired wasn’t the only source for this debate. Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb posted a story titled The Future of Blogging Revealed where she discusses the current trend of Lifestreaming taking over the Blogosphere. Her story mentions an open source app dedicated to Lifestreaming called SweetCron which became very popular this year who’s author Yongfook had already proclaimed that the Blog is dead. Now while I don’t agree with that sentiment, I do believe that adding some form of Lifestreaming components to our sites has almost become a requirement.

Looking towards 2009

So Lifestreaming has really come a long way very quickly and although we’re not there yet, I think the foundation has been laid for it to make huge strides in 2009. I think Lifestreaming needs to go down 2 separate paths in 2009.

The first path is to acquire new users by having existing services and major players focus on making Lifestreaming as simple and straightforward a process as possible. They also need to continue educating users on the benefits of Lifsetreaming to encourage its use.

Now that we are good at easily capturing this mountain of data, we need to find creative ways of using it. So the second path is aimed more at the seasoned early adopters. We need to find better ways to analyze the data and provide unique and meaningful information from it. Part of this will include creating ways of filtering the noise to prioritize the meaningful personalized data for us that currently gets lost as the stream flies by.

2009 is going to be great. Now that so many of us have embraced Lifestreaming we are just looking for better ways to utilize it both personally and professionaly and the coming year should bring many innovations to help us coral this wild beast that was unleashed this year.

• Wrapping Technology and Lifestyle – the Weiner way! – FeedShared, Lifestreaming Service in Spanish Info on a new Lifestreaming service called feedshared.com that will be Spanish language only
• Lifestreaming 101: Put All Your Content in One Place with Google Reader – Details on how and why to use Google Reader to archive your Lifestream
• Reap Rewards on Lost Content » Adotas – Article on how to adapt advertising to Lifestreaming. “For advertisers, engaging with people’s Lifestreams will require concentration on aligning their campaigns with content that consumers are reading and sharing with their social networks.”
• The looming crisis: Personal syndication overload | Webware – Maintaining a Lifestream can be a very complicated proposition as displayed by this post from Rafe. I hope the very challenging service he proposes is being developed by someone
• Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 – Controversial post on Wired declaring the blog dead as have others recently. For the record, I disagree. I believe Lifestreaming and social media services are just transforming the blog to it’s next evloutional step
• Meetings « Ben Turner’s Blog – Post discusses methods that Lifestreaming can be used effectively in the workplace to communicate updates from different departments in an orginazation
• Getting a foot in the door – Birmingham Post – “lifestreaming and online networking are moving the web has become a great way of saying a lot about yourself before someone has met you. Students with a clear passion for design and a keen eye for new trends could (and arguably should) be setting up a tumblr or other bookmarking tool to help potential employers check out what they’re consuming online. This is an updatable and accessible way of illustrating content you’re looking at in a format which is accessible and familiar for employers within the creative industries. Being ahead of the crowd in these types of environments might just be enough to get you noticed and help you stand out from the crowd.”
• You Know, If Yahoo Could Actually Focus, They’d Be a Helluva Lifestreaming Service « I’m Not Actually a Geek – Thoughts on how Yahoo’s new profile could and should evolve into a Lifestream
• louisgray.com: Is Lifestreaming a Catalyst for What’s Coming After Web 2.0? – My first guest post on Louisgray.com
• Lifestreaming to Infostreaming: The what’s next? – Tris Hussey provides his thoughts regarding my guest post on Louis Gray’s blog

• Tumblr Takes 750K Series A – More proof that investors are now funding Lifestreaming. Tumblr gets funding
• Breaking: Google Acquires Jaiku, Why Not Twitter? – Mashable’s news on the Google purchase of Jaiku. Lifestreaming finally hits the big time in the form of a major acquisition
• Share Personal Memes on Meemi – Mashable info on another Tumblr inspired service called Meemi
• listography: your life in lists – Interesting minimal list creation site that could be used to create a manually based Lifestream. I found this via the first BoingBoing video show
• Soup turns big ideas into teeny blogs | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone – Webware info on Soup which is a Tumblr inspired Lifestream service
• Slifeshare Relaunches Sharing Network – Mashable info on Lifestreaming service Slifeshare
• Utterz: Yet another nanoblog platform… or is it? | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone – Webware info on a new service that has some Lifestreaming features
• Readr: Latest News Feed Aggregator – Mashable blurb on a new Lifestreamin service called Readr
• Elsewhere I’m: Relationship Update Stream – Interesting development from Six Apart on what appears to be another player in the movement happening to build backend systems to help communicate data in a better fashion than just polling for feeds.