Two months ago I wrote a post about how the big boys are starting their Lifestreaming initiatives. At the time Yahoo had just rolled out their new profile pages and they really seemed to be these isolated outposts without any functionality worth mentioning.
Well the other day they finally added the ability to provide a Lifestream from a pretty large list of services. I won’t list all the sites but you can see a good number of them from the image below.
Adding services is very easy with an auto-discovery tool they provide. There’s also a few levels of privacy to determine who you want to share your stream with. Lastly you can easily delete individual stream items should you care to do so.
Once finished they offer a version of your Lifestream on your main profile page as well as a dedicated Lifetreaming page. There also appears to be a page provides a stream of all your friends but I can’t really test it since I currently only have one user as a connection. Perhaps you can connect with me over there and start adding services so I can see what it looks like.
As of right now Yahoo is in the lead over Google and Microsoft with regards to a Lifestreaming initiative. Google currently only offers links to external services without ability to import. Microsoft offers a handful of services and does a poor job of displaying the data on the profile. It will be interesting to watch each player develop their profiles over the year.
One thing I’m curious about is as to where does this movement leave (Yahoo owned) MyBlogLog? There is definitely duplication now amongst the two services and it would appear that Yahoo will continue to push forward more Lifestreaming functionality. I guess time will tell.
You can read more about this at:
- TechCrunch – Yahoo Becomes More FriendFeed-like, Adds Updates From 20 Outside Sites
- Ars Technica – Yahoo opens up social dashboard to third-party activity
On a sidenote I just wanted to say WTF were all of these guys smoking when they decided to come up with GUID‘s as the basis for profile URL’s? It boggles the mind.
Here’s what I mean. My profile URL for each service:
The funniest thing about this, is the lack of a flickr on the profile. Since it's Yahoo owned as well, it's very surprising not to see it on the lists. Especially with Picasa, SmugMug and Zoomr on there. hehe.
Wow! How did I miss that? It's truly amazing that they don't offer Flickr! Thanks for pointing that out.