Add Software Usage to Your Lifestream with Wakoopa

I’m always on the hunt for new sites to add more interesting information to my Lifestream. I’ve yet to find one that allows me to show my recent restaurant trips or TV viewing, but I’m sure they’re around the corner. But today I was able to find one that allows me to share my software usage history.

This is a fantastic addition to a Lifestream as I’m sure everyone is always curious to find that new golden nugget utility someone uses, or discover other great software that friends or people we admire use. Signing up is quick and painless although you do have to download client software (PC & Mac available) that runs in the background and sits on your taskbar. I’m not a big fan of additional memory resident apps but after running it for a while it seemed pretty stable. Only occupying 7k and no visible interference yet.

After setting up the account, adding more info I wandered around a bit and found some familiar faces in the Lifestreaming community and added them as contacts. Soon enough my page started displaying the applications I was running along with tracking how much time I was spending using them. By adding contacts you then can navigate to a section called “My Dashboard” which displays an aggegated list of all the applications your contacts have been using. There’s a neat block on the page as well that displays current versions of all the software it knows you are running. I can never seem to keep up with all the updates that come out for the multitude of software I use, so this is a handy area to glance at. Lastly on the dashboard there is another block that lists reviews of the software you are running from members of the Wakoopa site.

Also a cool little addition that seems to have just little blurbs, but can hopefully become more useful over time. I would like to see them provide a little analysis to provide recommendations such as showing possibly related programs I may be interested in based on my usage or show me alternatives to programs that I use that are popular among other users. There is lots more they can do with this data and I’m sure they will. All of the blocks mentioned have RSS feeds available as well.

I used my comp for a while longer moving around from app to app and then visited my overview page again to see all the programs that had appeared. Cool it tracked them all. Now it was time to add the feed to my Lifestream. So I headed over to iStalkr and decided to start there. To my surprise they had already added Wakoopa to their common services. Not too surprising since one of those contacts I added was Lynn Wallenstein who is one of the developers over at iStalkr. You can follow her here. I then made my way over to Jaiku and added it there as well. It’s clear how offering custom icons to identify the feed types make all the difference. iStalker allows changing icons even if the feed isn’t from a common service. Other sites out there take notice!

I’m looking forward to using Wakoopa as a resource that goes beyond using it as a source for my Lifestream. Definitely worth checking out.