Lifestream Blog

SocialThing Version 2.0 Adds Features and Services

Mark Krynsky — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 06:19:52 +0000

On the heels of a slew of new features with their recent 2.0 update, Socialthing has recently released some more.

Added new services Brightkite, Plurk, Seesmic, and Guitar Hero
Added several new shortcuts
Visual color queues for new items in the Lifestream
Visual icons detailing the types of account activity available for each service and publishing capabilities

You can read more about the update here. If you’re interested in trying out SocialThing I was able to secure invites for Lifestream Blog readers. Just go create an account and use the invite code “letmeinnow” without the quotes.

In playing with the update I added my Brightkite account to SocialThing and I wanted to show you some of the more granular details that can be available when you dig a little deeper into adding a service.

Below you will see an image of the options available when I added my Brightkite account to SocialThing:

Here you see quite a few options

Ability to set an individual service private
Multiple options for who you want to share this service
Ability to use this service as your SocialThing Avatar (this is available for all services)
And lastly specific options for sharing content available on the Brightkite service

Here are the options when adding Brightkite to FriendFeed

All I have is the ability to add my username with no other options.

For some, flexible options when importing and displaying their data from a service may not be important, but I find these details to be interesting to share with others when digging deeper into these services. I’ve written a longer detailed post about this in the past.

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Modified Version of SimpleLife Lifestreaming Plugin for Wordpress

Mark Krynsky — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:01:35 +0000

Last year we saw the release of SimpleLife. It was a Lifestreaming plugin for Wordpress based off of Simplepie. Today I came across the blog of Thomas Trumble who has recently spent time editing the original plugin to add some additional features.

Here’s a List:

Addition of 6 extra feeds for a total of 9
Addition of built in support for feeds from Yelp, YouTube Favorites, Google Reader Shared Items, Pandora Favorite Artists and Songs, Plaxo Pulse, 2 Amazon Wishlists, Tumblr and StumbleUpon
Implementation of Db0’s Google Reader Lifestream Archive and a modified version of his Google Reader Comment Tracking concept that supports and formats feeds from Twitter, Del.icio.us, Netflix, coComment, Disqus and Intense Debate
Implementation of Db0’s concept for showing the number of items and length of time in the lifestream
Commented out the charts of recent activity - they just didn’t seem useful to me, but it’s there if you want to use them and my additions should show up in them
Addition of tons of additional favicons for streaming services so you don’t need to add them yourself, whatever you want is probably now included

If you are a user of the original plugin or are looking for one to add to your Wordpress blog it’s worth a look. You can see the plugin in action here and you can find his plugin page here.

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Lifestream Posts & Pages for July 8th 2008

Mark Krynsky — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:48:18 +0000

Social Commerce: Lifestream Marketing - “I am convinced that the concept behind FriendFeed will be a mass phenomenon and maybe it will even become one of the most important new channels for marketers, because it’s the closest digital equivalent to a real-life recommendation.”
Christopher Blizzard » announcing whoisi - Announcement of new Lifestreaming service whoisi.com
Pipes: XBOX 360 GamerTag to RSS (by InternetDuctTape.com) - Enter your XBOX 360 gamer tag to get an RSS feed of the games you have been playing. Great addition as a source for your Lifestream.
Lifestreaming Application Oneswirl is on the market - Details of the backend used to build the service with hopes for a buyer
The Otterman Empire @ work: the guid , the bad and the ugly. repetition is what lifestreaming is, lifestreaming is repetition… - Discusses using guids to reduce duplication and signal to noise ratio
Wall Street Journal - Ways to Follow Your Friends on the Web - Article on Lifestreaming that offers a primer and covers several different services
Adding richness to activity streams | FactoryCity - “Activity streams could become much more valuable by being easier for web services to consume, interpret and to provide better filtering and weighting of shared activities to make it easier for people to get access to relevant information”
New York Press - Feeding Frenzy - Story about Lifestreaming I was interviewed for at the New York Press
Carbon account, meet lifestreaming. Lifestreaming, meet carbon accounting! at Greenmonk: the blog - Will carbon accounting software and its requirement for constant inputs from all levels of business bring lifestreaming applications into the Enterprise 2.0 fold?
Pistachio Consulting Inc. » Woo Hoo! A DIY Embryonic Brainsieve - Interesting widget & Facebook app created to display a fixed number or items by popularity from several feeds.

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Share Streaming MP3s at FriendFeed and Swurl

Mark Krynsky — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:58:31 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about Swurl but today found a great new feature I hadn’t seen during my original testing of the service. I had added my Last.fm account but it hadn’t imported my “loved” tracks yet. Today when I revisited I was very surprised to find what it does when importing your tracks.

Here’s an example from Marshall Kirkpatrick’s page on Swurl

There are several cool features that supplement imported tracks. There is a play button that will stream the song, if you mouseover you will see the cover of the cd, there will be a download link for the track, and finally you are presented with lyrics for the track. Some of the features will not always work for tracks as they are apparently running track data through a variety of services to achieve this which aren’t always available.

FriendFeed has also recently added the ability to stream enclosures on the site in a flash player. Yesterday I started coming across some feed items from user edythe labeled “Last Loved MP3’s” that included the inline player. I was curious and wanted to know how she was doing this. It turns out she was using this yahoo pipe which converts the Last.fm recently loved tracks XML feed to a RSS feed including links to MP3’s from Seeqpod.

If you want to do the same:

Enter your Last.fm user id on the Yahoo Pipe page
click “Run Pipe”
Click on the RSS icon titled “More options”
Click on “Get as RSS”
Now copy the url in your browser to your buffer
Go to FriendFeed and click on the “Me” tab
Click on the “Edit/add” link under Services
Click on “Blog” under Blogging
Paste the url from your buffer and click on the “Import Blog” button

Now just go start loving tracks on Last.fm and watch as they start to appear in your feed. Keep in mind that this feed is just including links for tracks if they are available on Seeqpod and in many cases they won’t work properly. Nevertheless it’s a pretty cool little hack to share your loved songs on FriendFeed.

These are some really cool features that are taking the Lifestreaming experience to the next level by by offering immediate exposure for discovering new music your friends listen to. It’s great seeing new innovation in the space by leveraging additional services and functionality and I look forward to watching this logic applied in other areas.

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Lifestream.fm Relaunches with New Features and Adobe Air App

Mark Krynsky — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:18:54 +0000

I wrote about Lifestream.fm a while back. This new service came on the scene and very quickly got purchased. Well it’s now been 2 months since the acquisition and they have been working on a new version and it has just been released.

Here’s a list of new features:

Support for 56 services
Comments - You can now leave comments on items posted.
Filters - Filter services and followers
Search - Not just your stream, but all of Lifestream.fm for content and friends
Import your friends from your address book
See your last visitors displayed
Extended profiles with contact info
Delete posted items to your stream
A German version supporting new German services

If you want to try these new features out though, you better hope you already have an account as they have now gone into closed beta. If you’re interested in joining I’m pretty sure I can secure some invite codes that will be posted in the comments later.

Along with these new features they’ve launched an Adobe Air app for the service. I would report some info on this but unfortunately it did not work properly for me.

You can find my page here and you can read more about the new relaunch on their blog here.

Read more at ReadWriteWeb - Can Lifestream.fm Compete With FriendFeed?

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Thoughts on New Lifestreaming Service Swurl

Mark Krynsky — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:32:20 +0000

I decided to try out Swurl today. They’re the latest newcomer to the Lifestreaming party.

Creating an account and getting started has to be one of the quickest, no-nonesense processes I have seen in a Lifestreaming service yet. Heck, they have the signup form right on the home page. You are then presented with a list of their supported services to add to your Lifestream. You can add the services quickly and I like the fact that in most cases they provide details regarding the content that will be imported from the services you add. Providing these details are a pet peeve of mine. FriendFeed does a poor job of doing this, while Iminta does by far the best of all services out there. I wrote a very detailed piece about it here.

They currently offer 19 services including Blockbuster which I don’t remember being offered anywhere else, not even Profilactic, well…at least for a few days until this post goes live. They also support FriendFeed friends, but not content. More on that later. Lastly they don’t offer the ability to import your own feeds.

After you’re done adding services you hit a button and boom, you’re taken to your Lifestream page. Right away I noticed that the page looked all to familiar. Being an avid Wordpress user I noticed that the design is identical to the default K2 theme. From the font used, navigation, and down to the same #3371A3 hex header color! I know totally unimportant and geeky but I thought it would be fun to share.

The Lifestream itself aims to provide a slightly stylistic approach to items similar to Tumblr to some degree. But unlike Tumblr, they offer built in commenting on items. I like the larger photo imports and video embeds. Another big plus is importing of my tags for Del.icio.us items. And even though all the tag does is link to my Del.icio.us page for said tag, I really wish Lifestreaming services supported tagging across all stream items.

Next up is the coolest feature and that’s the Friends functionality. Joining a Lifestreaming service with hopes of interacting with other users can be daunting if you don’t already have friends using it. You can feel a bit aprehensive to engage strangers. One of the coolest features of Swurl is that when you visit your friends page for the first time it’s already populated with content from all your friends that it auto-discovered and imported from the services you added. I believe that’s part of the purpose for adding your FriendFeed account. This is a much better, non-intrusive way that should be used by more services as opposed to asking for your email or any account password for that matter. They provide a list that links the usernames for each of your friends to their pages on the respective service. This page could benefit greatly from filters by user and/or service as well.

But the real kicker is that if any of your imported friends have a Swurl account as well, they automatically follow them for you and provide links to their pages as well. That’s pretty cool. I even noticd that as I revisited the page I found new friends had recently signed up to Swurl and were automatically added. Of note though is that you can’t comment on items from this view, even if the user has an account on Swurl. You will need to go to their profile page to be able to comment on the item.

I liked the unique Timeline view. This provides a calendar type view broken down daily by boxes that display items from your stream which includes thumbnails for photos & videos. It also populated boxes with cd covers for songs you liked on Last.fm. Although not a very practical approach for displaying information on a busy timeline, I appreciate the thought. I think a good, clean, functional calendar view would be a great feature addition to any Lifestreaming service and wish more of them would create them.

Lastly they offer an about page that provides details on the services that are used to creat the Lifestream along with an editable text box you can use to provide anything you want. They also offer the ability to provide a replacement header with any image you care to upload.

If you decide to check out Swurl, you can find me here.

Read more about Swurl:

Lifehacker - Swurl Aggregates Your Online Activity in a Calendar
TechCrunch - Swurl’s Lifecasting Generates Your Blog For You

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FriendFeed Hack for Immediate Feed Item Updates

Mark Krynsky — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:04:29 +0000

Update: Apparently I’m blind and need to pay more attention as you will see after reading the first comment. In any case, I still think this tip is useful for people. This has now been downgraded from a hack to a tip.

So how often do you upload a photo to Flickr or bookmark something on Del.icio.us only to wait patiently for it to appear in your feed while continually refreshing your browser?

FriendFeed definitely seems to have varying timeframes when they poll services to add items to your feed. Twitter seems to often happen very quickly, while other services can take quite long. I don’t have details on their methods for polling services, but I do have a hack to speed up the process that I will share with you.

First off, upload a photo, bookmark a page, or add whatever content to a service you’ve added to FriendFeed
Go to FriendFeed and click on the “Me” tab to bring up your profile
Click on the “Edit/Add” link under your Services listing
Click on the service you added something to
When the service screen comes up click on the “save changes” button
Now when the page reloads your new item should appear

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Top 30 FriendFeed Users Based on Google Ranking

Mark Krynsky — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:31:16 +0000

I came across an amusing post by Glenn Slaven (author of the great FriendFeed Comments Wordpress Plugin) where he had discovered that 2 FriendFeed users (Deepak & Kevin,) appeared in Google’s search results as more relevant than the about page. He mentions some other interesting ranks after clicking on the more results.

I decided to take Glenn’s lead and progress this to the next level by listing the top 30 FriendFeed users based on those results. Here you will find some of the usual suspects that always make these lists, but there are lots of new faces. Keep in mind that this is just a current snapshot, but it will be interesting to monitor over time.

Top 30 FriendFeed Users Based on Google Ranking

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Display Your Twitter Friends on a World Map

Mark Krynsky — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:28:50 +0000

Today I started thinking about how cool it would be if I could see the locations of my Twitter friends on a Map. After spending some time Googling for such a tool I was only able to find one, and interestingly enough it only became available a few days ago.

I came across this post by Andy Murdoch who has created a Yahoo Pipe that puts nice pushpin representations of all your Twitter users on a map of the world. It also allows you to scroll through them displaying their names and Bio’s. Also, since it’s a Yahoo Pipe you can embed it into your own site.

Here’s an example using my Twitter account.

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Examining the Evolution of Lifestreaming Into Lifeportals

Terri Ann — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:57:33 +0000

This is the first guest post from reader Terri Ann. I wrote about her custom Lifestream previously here. You can visit her blog at blog.ninedays.org and don’t forget to check out her lifestream. If you are interested in writing a guest post, just head on over to my contact page

The other day on css tricks.com, they posted about creating your own social home which appeared to me as more of a personal/social portal than a lifestream. A lifeportal, if you will.

Chris, over there, provided a great download to get you started building your own lifeportal using only jQuery and JSON to query the API’s for three popular web services: Flickr, Twitter and ScrnShots.

His article also walks you through everything those scripts are doing, giving you the tools to really customize the download to suit your own needs.
It’s those customization skills that are so critical with lifestreams and lifeportals since everyone uses their own set of social networking, social bookmarking and other social sharing services.

The way I see it, the main difference between lifeportals and most lifestreams is that this idea or a portal page is based more on the service and the latest information from that service than the date. How else can I put it? Like a page of feeds about the now, more than the overall time line and progression.

One great lifeportal really brings that idea of the now together. Jared Zimmerman has really simplified the idea and uses Flickr, Amazon, Yahoo!, Facebook, 43Things as well as other APIs to show more about his life, right now.

I’ve stumbled across a few other lifeportals that really show the strengths in this idea of separation of feeds rather than the integration into a time line.

Jon Phillips Streaming - Jon uses Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg as well as integrating other information like his sites and Skype contact.

Katy in Las Vegas - A very similar organization as Jon’s but uses Twitter, a blogging RSS feed, StumbleUpon and then shows her social network profiles and contact form in a similar manner, really keeping the flow of the page very consistent. Oh, and it’s a super cute look (is the girl in me showing again?)

Which do you prefer to use for yourself or see on another person’s site?
Where do you think this trend is going? Do you think people are going to focus more on the now or the time line idea?

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