How to Create or Add Your Lifestream to Facebook

There’s been plenty of talk, both positive and negative, about the new Facebook layout and design. One of the best changes in my biased opinion is the fact that they now offer the ability to create a Lifestream, and make it front and center on your profile.

I personally have my largest group of friends IRL on Facebook so I have always wanted to take advantage of the ability to add a Lifestream to reach them there as opposed to forcing them to use my preferred networks. There have been several options based on services that offer apps (discussed later) but I’m happy they finally are realizing the adavantages of just incorporating it themselves.

Prior to the new design they slowly had started adding functionality that offered the ability to import a few limited services. This was a nice start allowing people to slowly understand and start the process of creating a Lifestream. They have since added quite a few more services and now offer a total of 11 services including Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Yelp, Google Reader, youTube, Last.fm, Pandora, Picasa, StumbleUpon, Hulu, along with the ability to add a single RSS feed as well.

To get started follow these steps:

1. Go to your Profile page
2. Click on the Settings link under the “post” button for updating your status
3. Click on the “automatically import activity” link
4. Start adding services that you have accounts on

Twitter is not supported yet, but if you’re like me and don’t update Facebook but want to sync your Twitter status, then add the Twitter app and have it update your status for you.

There are other options for adding a Lifestream to Facebook as well if you’re not happy with their integration. FriendFeed has a great app that they’ve recently upgraded that offers a much nicer view and even allows adding your Lifestream as a tab.

Lifestream.fm also offers a Facebook app but it doesn’t seem to have been updated to take advantage of the new Facebook. It doesn’t integrate well or offer my isolated Lifestream, only a stream of me and my friends with a link to Lifestream.fm for my Lifestream.

Unfortunately several other options are no longer viable. There is a SocialThing app but it seems to be broken, and apps I used in the past from the now defunct correlate.us and intuch are no longer available.

I’m guessing there must also be some other creative ways of adding a Lifestream as well which I haven’t discovered. If you know of any, please leave them in the comments.