I’m currently working on an updated version of the Lifestream service comparison matrix and should have it ready very soon. Having worked on it for a while, it’s easy to see a pattern of feature sets that most services are supporting with some nice unique items available from several services. But in the end the differences are for the most part, just variations on methods of displaying, editing, and interfacing with the data.
Early on I knew creating a Lifestream was a great way to let my friends know what my current interests were and what I was paying attention to, but knew that it would evolve. And I’m not talking about ways that companies could monetize it, I meant the evolution that would take place when some innovative ideas would surface on ways to do something with all of this data.
FriendFeed appears to be the first service that has started working on the evolution of Lifestreaming or should I say Lifestream 2.0 (I tried hard not to say that but couldn’t hold myself back). They have recently addded some features that go beyond the common smorgasbord found at most services.
They have begun to show several stats. The first shows a breakdown of all the feed items posted by your friends. What they do is tally up all the feed updates for each service and provide a pie chart breaking them down. They also in turn provide the same chart specific to your updates as well. On FriendFeed you also have the ability to comment on feed items as well as marking an item as a favorite (flag as “Like”). Based on this data they provide a user bar graph ranking the interest of other members in your feed items which is calculated by their comments and “Likes”. Conversely they provide the same user graph based on your activity of commenting and liking other users feed items.
Sample Graph Below
Photo courtesy of Flickr user ducks127
The second feature is a simple recommendation engine. Now on your settings menu, there is a tab which provides a list of other members that you might be interested in following. The text on the heading of the page states “The people below are popular among your friends, and you might find their feeds interesting”. So I’m guessing that they’re looking at the frequency of these users being followed by your friends that you have one degree of separation from.
Below are my current recommendations
These 2 new features are nothing ground-breaking, but they are a glimpse of what’s coming in the Lifestreaming space. I’m happy to see that FriendFeed is doing some forward thinking here and can’t wait to see what other cool features they and others have in store for us in the months to come.
You can keep up on FriendFeed’s progress by following them on their blog
Thanks for the invite Mark! 🙂
Hum, I don’t share your happiness, Mark.
FriendFeed work fine, and have nice features. But I don’t think they introduced revolutionary – next level – ; it’s just basic lifestreaming with some statistics processing. No more, nothing new.
Mark, I tell you “Why current social networks aggregators need to manage friends-list and request to invite our friends to follow them ? Do they really need this ?”.
NB: I hate spend my expensive time to re-do same tasks on every new networks :o| .oO(and afraid to share my mail addressbook)
Olivier, I didn’t say the new features were revolutionary. In fact they’re just small steps in the Lifestreaming evolution, but I think they’re worth highlighting. It’s notable that they are the first service to do something with the data and I wanted to point that out.
I’m not sure I understand your second comment, but I like being able to follow several of my friends lifestreams in an aggregated feed on a single service.
I mean a social-network aggregator don’t need to create friends-list to fetch friends content and activities…
Example: you can’t follow your friends lifestreams whose not subscribe to FriendFeed.
With my (future) Seek-LiNE friendstream dashboard, you follow all your friends and you don’t need to invite them :o) .oO(I use it, just some bugs to fix)
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@Oliver actually friendfeed allows you to follow people who are not on friendfeed… it’s called the imaginary friend feature. You just enter their username and friendfeed will scrape all public data from that site for you. Works really well.
@Nathan: I had see this feature, and I known how it’s work… Not right way to follow our friends without they known themselves :o| .oO(and how I’m sure this is their content and activities ?)
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