Build a Beautiful Lifestream Quickly with Flavors.me

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Last night I discovered a new service called Flavors.me that can be used to quickly create a beautiful Lifestream. The service was clearly built focused with simplicity and design in mind. Setting up an account takes minutes since all you provide is your name, email, and an about paragraph followed by the services you want to link to your account.

The choice of services is limited at this time with only Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, Last.fm, Facebook, Goodreads, Netflix, and RSS feeds currently available. Once you’ve added a service you have the ability to choose which items get imported into your stream. For instance with Last.fm you can choose whether to display recent tracks, top artists, top tracks, and user info by selecting each item individually with checkboxes.

flavors_services

After you’ve provided your site info and added you’re services you can move on to the design. Flavors.me provides a very  nice floating design panel that allows you to edit the layout, background, fonts and color scheme. You can also upload a background image to use. I found using this panel to be really nice and unique tool.

flavors_design_panel

They currently offer 3 different layouts that each offer differing display functionality so be sure to try each of them out. If you upload an image you can control the placement a bit. The fonts selection and sizing with realtime preview is sweet and there’s a predefined set of color schemes with the ability to edit the palette.

The display of the services is one of the unique aspects of Flavors.me. Instead of your standard feed with text and thumbnails they offer some nice visuals for the data imported from your services based on the items you chose to import. Flickr offers a nice large image with thumbnails to navigate and display them while staying on the site. You can also select personal photos or favorites from a dropdown menu. Each of the services offer nice visuals and navigation options that are uniquely different.

flavors_service_view2

flavors_service_view

After playing around with the service, Flavors.me is very impressive and shows a ton of promise especially considering it’s currently in its alpha testing phase. I really enjoyed the UI, design and features. I think it offers some uniqueness I haven’t seen in similar services out there. I want to see support for more services which will hopefully come soon. I really look forward to watching them progress.

I highly recommend giving them a try. You can use the invite code “lifestreamblog” to sign up and try the service right now. You can find my page here.

If you’re still not sold you can watch their service overview video below.

About The Author

I created Lifestream Blog and hope you enjoy the site. I'm always looking for contributors so contact me if you're interested. You can follow the rest of what I like to write about at my personal site.

16 thoughts on “Build a Beautiful Lifestream Quickly with Flavors.me”

  1. jonathanmarcus

    Hey Mark. Thanks for such an incredibly thoughtful and in-depth review. There is so much more wonderful stuff in store too.

    John Wehr, who built Flavors, and I have been reading lifestreamblog for well over a year now. It was the first site John suggested we look at when discussing the idea. So, thanks for such great coverage of the whole space.

    I created a 'special' invite code for this blog and it is: lifestreamblog

  2. Robert Safuto

    It looks great Mark but here's the problem. Why invest any time in the service if the chances are that it won't make it? Seriously. We've seen FriendFeed, which was well capitalized and well staffed, basically get folded into Facebook because they weren't gaining mainstream adoption. And no matter what FriendFeed may say the fact is that they weren't getting the traffic to justify continuing as a free service. And now the traffic over there is steadily declining.

    Storytlr was a very promising, and very similar, service to Flavors.me and they're shutting down at the end of the year. So what I need to know from new services before I put in the time setting it up, and tweaking it, and telling others about it is how they plan to survive the first couple of years. It sounds like a harsh assessment I know but we've seen enough social services come and go to realize that most aren't worth the investment of time. And with so many services (Tumblr, Posterous, Netvibes and Facebook to name some of the more popular ones) competing for my time and my content I need to know more before I try or recommend this.

    This service could have a great plan and end up doing great things but I think it's worth a few minutes of my time to let the people behind it know what savvy web folks think when they here about new aggregation services these days.

  3. Mark Krynsky

    Thanks for the kind words Jonathan. I love hearing about people benefiting from Lifestream Blog as a resource. It really makes me feel like what I do here is worth it. You're not the first founder of a service to state that which makes me feel that much better that hopefully I'm helping evangelize the concept.

    I'll have to dig further into the functionality as I rushed a bit to get the post up but as I stated even what I saw so far was impressive and I can't wait to see what else you have in store.

  4. Mark Krynsky

    Robert, I totally hear you and understand where you are coming from. For myself I consider my self-hosted WordPress site as my main hub as I'm in full control of it. This will probably reamain the case for the forseeable future and I doubt I will ever relinquish my main personal site to a 3rd party startup. The only exception would be if said startup had both a sound business plan and a proven ability to export my content (Squarespace comes to mind here).

    That being said, I use all of the services you mentioned in your post solely as tools to both test out and broaden my personal reach without fear of complete investment. If they go away, it's no skin off my back although in some cases disappointing.

    Of course this is my mentality and I understand that some people do plant themselves on these services as their sole hub. I think it's very fair for those folks to heed your questions and concerns.

  7. jonathanmarcus

    All good and valid issues Robert. Having said that, it will take you less than 10 minutes to create something nice, and we don't store any of your service data. I think that is quite a differentiating proposition – aside from the background image you choose to upload and maybe your description text, we store a nominal amount of your data. Just something to consider, because we would love to have you 🙂

  8. jameshicks

    Created my site tonight – check it out here: http://flavors.me/HicksNewMedia
    I had problems getting the Facebook integration working – hopefully they can get that worked out soon.
    I most definitely plan to use this as my quick stop site for folks looking to keep up with my lifestream. Thanks for the heads up Mark

  9. Andy in France

    Jonathan, anyone who cannot recognize that Flavors brings the ability to create
    graphically stunning and functional personal pages to the masses cannot see the forest for the trees, meaning that they have become too adept at technology
    to understand that most of us are 'noobs'. I am a noob, who had tried all the so called 'easy' to configure services, but when I found Flavors, looked at the User created sites, I was blown away by what I saw, IMHO big time studio graphic quality. I then played with it just for a few minutes, and I knew Flavors had taken site 'EZ” site creation to a new level. Those of us who are bored with all
    the 'new templates and themes' but yet don't have the ability to create something without all the cookie cutter themes, can now create something
    we can proud of in minutes, and without valium. Not everyone is a visionary.
    Some of these technology 'reviewers' have become technophobes themselves.
    Doomed to view everything thru the lens of what came before.
    You've got a winner !!! Millions of us noobs will be rooting for you.

  10. Mark Krynsky

    Good points Jonathan. You guys really just offer an aggregation point with a beautiful interface to customize the presentation layer for said services. I agree with your points too.

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