Another recent show had Natalie Del Conte and Jason Calacanis on and at about 30:10 of the show they began a discussion in which Leo surfaced Gordon Bell’s name (happening all over the place lately it seems) and talked about his Lifelogging research with regards to personal monitoring. They mentioned the Fitbit which is just one of many new devices that are coming out with the ability to track health and fitness data which can be used as way to monitor our own wellness within a Lifestream.

I recently wrote both about Gordon as well as this new personal logging revolution that has begun with the proliferation of all these new devices. While the aggregation of social media was the catalyst for Lifestreaming, I think the ability to have wearable devices that can passively monitor and collect data about us will be one of many new enhancements coming in the near future.

If we rely on technology for documenting, sorting and storing information — creating digital diaries, or “lifestreaming” — what will become of our minds? Although there is not a lot of research on this subject, psychologists have a range of opinions about where we’re headed.

It goes on to talk about the effects on the brain and how learning to use the technologies that allow us to Lifestream offer an important way to keep the mind stimulated much like puzzles. The future is discussed where it may be possible to do most of this using a microchip implanted in the brain. Another positive effect of Lifestreaming could offer is extending the cognitive life of Alzheimer’s patients by 10 years by presenting them with their own memories.

But there are some more insightful effects that can be negative that are pointed out. This particular paragraph provided me with some introspection regarding how I’ve been affected by my personal Lifestreaming.

But recording everything you do takes people out of the “here and now,” psychologists say. Constant documenting may make people less thoughtful about and engaged in what they’re doing because they are focused on the recording process, Schwartz said. Moreover, if these documented memories are available to others, people may actually do things differently.

This statement offers a pretty big revelation that I’m personally guilty of and have witnessed in others. Sarah Perez wrote a great story earlier this year precisely about this issue asking if “we’re forgetting to live”. I recently went to see U2 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and this was the epitome of what the story discussed. My eyes circled the rows in front of me and all around during the show where I viewed an overwhelming number of people who were glued to their cell phones sending out updates. I too was doing this mostly to send out photos through my stream but I was conscious of the phenomenon ocurring and really tried to limit my time spent doing this so I could enjoy the show. One guy in front of me spent the whole show recording a video of it on his digital compact camera…doh!

The second part of that paragraph is also very interesting. I can totally see how we may modify our behavior at an event specifically because of how we want to be perceived or be a character in the conversation that will make its way to Twitter and other social networks. The story provides quite a good read and I highly recommend you go read it.

The second story was titled “My week of recording a digital memory” written by John D. Sutter in which he took on the role of creating what I’d consider a pretty extreme version of a Lifestream where he attempted to record everything he did using either video or audio.

Be sure to click on the boxes in this image when you visit the story to get clips of John’s experiment

I personally think this goes too far, and John came to the same conclusion, but it was an interesting experiment nonetheless. He also discussed how the process interfered  and caused him to miss ‘living’ but did see value in being able to “store and curate a digital memory of highlights”.

He goes on to detail his process and gives tips along the way such as keeping video clips short, record what you can store, and try to track one thing at a time. That last tip was in reference to his desire to being able to glean something about his health, reading patterns, sleep cycles or work efficiency as part of the experiment. The problem was that by tracking all of those at once, he felt scatter-brained and states that focusing on one activity would have offered more insight.

Not only did CNN cover Lifestreaming with these 2 stories, but they also recorded a video segment which I’ve provided below where both Elizabeth and John are interviewed about their stories and experience.

These were 2 very well done stories on Lifestreaming that I really enjoyed and look forward to more such pieces that delve deeper into Lifestreaming coming from other more mainstream media outlets in the future.

Monica Keller speaks to the crowd at the Kodak Theater for the 140Conf (more photos below)

To cut right to the chase, Monica Keller of MySpace was showing their Activity Streams implementation. Activity Streams is an extension to the Atom format that was designed to store the format and information that could be used for a Lifestream. I was probably the most excited person in the Kodak Theater for this talk. I have been following the Activity Streams initiative since its inception and had heard about MySpace adopting it but this was the first time I got to see the goods and get full details behind it.

Here’s a short clip I recorded from Monica’s talk

Mike Jones who is now the COO of MySpace spoke prior to Monica and he spent quite a bit of time emphasizing the importance of the (Life)Stream. He even stated that “The stream is the flowing blood of a social network”. So it seems like MySpace gets it. They understand that providing a central presence for an open platform that facilitates the sharing of content created outside of their service is crucial to their success.

I was able to speak to Monica for a little while after her talk and discussed some more specifics about what they’re working on. I believe she told me that they expect to roll out Lifestreaming to all users this year, but I haven’t been able to get her to confirm this via email prior to this post.

Now I think everyone sees the elephant in the room and knows that MySpace has quite an uphill battle to regain all the users that its been hemorrhaging to Facebook but their Lifestreaming implementation may be able to help them retain and possibly get some users back depending on how well it’s implemented. Facebook’s implementation for allowing you to import services is limited, fairly hidden and not very good.

I really am looking forward to watching MySpace push this envelope helping bust the dam of data that is necessary to get all social networks to compete on the same playing field. I for one am definitely paying attention to MySpace now and will watch how this plays out over the next few months.

Photos from the talk. Full set on Flickr here

So you’re asking what the hell does that have to do with Lifestreaming right? Well tonight I saw a new Motorola Cliq commercial that really caught my attention because it took the approach of showing what amounted to a literal Lifestream. I won’t explain it because I’ve embedded the video below.

While not the same premise as the music videos I found the correlation interesting nonetheless and a good excuse to share the music videos. A little over a month ago I wrote about the announcement of the Motorola Cliq and now it’s been released. You can learn more on their new site here where they have a video that specifically states ”see your entire Life in a single Stream”. They also seem to have a simulator available that you can play with.

I haven’t followed much more beyond this information on the Motorola Cliq but it’s the first Android powered phone by them and their implementation looks nice and definitely has a strong emphasis on Lifestreaming so it’s probably worth checking out. I’m hoping to run across someone who has one soon so I can play with it.

Well I’ve recently come across a developer named Wan Mhod Azri who has been blogging about and releasing all kinds of mods for the SweetCron platform. His latest release provides a tutorial for creating an iPhone compatible SweetCron theme. But this is just the latest in many projects he’s worked on for SweetCron.

Here’s a few others

• Multiple User SweetCron Release which includes the source file
• Adding tinyMCE WYSIWYG In Sweetcron Blog Editor
• Enable Multiple User Feeds In SweetCron part1 & part 2
• Adding New Option In SweetCron

If you are a SweetCron user then you are definitely going to want to visit Wan’s site and follow him on Twitter to learn more about ways to tweak your SweetCron.

As Louis continued to test the feature we noticed the url path to get to find out what lists a given user is on which is http://twitter.com/<username>/lists/memberships. But you only will get the results if your Twitter account is list enabled, otherwise all you get is a blank screen.

So I asked Louis if he could pull up my name to see if I was on any lists and he obliged and then sent me the screenshot you see below.

From the image you can glean quite a bit of information and start to see the value that this will bring to Twitter and its users. From the image I can see the users that have put me on lists along with the names they gave them and how many other people follow the list. I can imagine someone coming out with a tag cloud for users based on the keywords used in the lists they appear on. Or perhaps instead of users who are self serving when they add themselves to WeFollow (present company included) someone will create a version that is based on what others have deemed you. That follower number is also interesting as it can act as an authority value coupled with the users who are adding them. As you can see there are some great possibilities here. Conversely it will make for an interesting search to see who’s landed on the most douchebag lists

Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit Twitter CEO Evan Williams stated that he hates the much criticized Twitter suggested user list and can’t wait for this new feature to be relased. I too am very excited about the possibilities offered by having this functionality built-in directly into the service and accessible by the API. I’m sure we’re going to see some more interesting services that will utilize this data to create authority and trusted users lists that can then be used for all sorts of interesting things.

I can’t wait to be able to say goodbye to all the 3rd party kludgy external lists/groups features. I’m currently maintaining groups in Tweetdeck as well as a separate lists in the iPhone Simplytweet app. It will be a race to see which desktop and mobile apps release a lists capable versions. I can easily see myself jumping ship to another app that offers support first. I’m so excited and wait very anxiously for this to be released.

On shutting down…from their blog post

The reason is simple: our lives have moved on, kids were born, house were bought, new projects appeared and we don’t have time anymore to operate this service properly…We have spent the last months looking for alternatives, potential partners, and even thought about creating a startup around this project. Yet, in the end, nothing did really make sense for us and we have decided to pull the plug. It was a tough decision to make, it is a sad day, and we feel sorry for our passionate users who have put so much effort into their page and who have helped us improve the service through their many comments.

It’s a bummer because I felt Storytlr was one of the top personal Lifestreaming services out there. They especially excelled in offering very similar functionality to running a self-hosted Wordpress blog. The silver lining in their decision is that they’ve decided to open source the platform. Also, unlike the shutdown of Swurl which gave no warning when they pulled the plug, they are offering several backup options. They already provided the ability to export CSV files of your data. In addition to that they will make available a way to download all of your binary files that have been uploaded as a zip file. They’ve also created a Google Group to discuss issues moving forward. I applaud them for both helping their users and now providing their platform for the benefit of others. This is definitely a great service that will be missed. I wish both Laurent & Alard the best.

Here are the posts I wrote about Storytlr here on Lifestream Blog

• New Service Storytlr Offers Lifestreaming With a Few Twists
• Watch the US Airways Plane Crash Unfold in a Lifestream
• Storytlr Continues to Impress with a Batch of New Features
• Storytlr Continues Evolution by Adding Pages and Mediastreams

[Note: at the time of this post I had trouble both visiting the Storytlr site as well as the blog post. Hopefully things will be online again soon]

So Nick took his Lifestream data from Drupal and using his module connected it to the Papervision library which is a toolkit for creating 3D objects and animation in Flash. He provides some details on how he went about creating this mashup and provides a download of the .fla file used to create the .swf. so that anyone else interested can get a jumpstart on creating their own version.

I played with his demo (screencast below) a bit which wasn’t too exciting since it was only Tweets and Delicious links which actually didn’t link out for me. It would have been nice to see photos or videos but overall it’s demo of the concept that matters here which pretty cool and could be used for some interesting 3D visualization that include multiple users streams or other rich 3D content as well.

I recorded a quick little screencast to show this to you

There are quite a few panels that I’m looking forward to.  An obvious one is Lifestreaming & Your Business on Thursday the 15th at 1:30pm where Steve Rubel will no doubt be providing his knowledge and experience on how to utilize Lifestreaming tools and concepts effectively. Then on Friday at 11:30am the stars collide when so many speakers I enjoy will all be presenting at the same time. There’s Robert Scoble talking about social media changing news, Chris Pirillo discussing monetization methods for blogs, Louis Gray on technology and the real-time web, or Micah Baldwin and Jesse Stay on the wrong ways to use Twitter. I might be panel hopping to try and get some tidbits from each. There is plenty more I’m looking forward to but I’ll return with what I’ve found during and after the conference.

Then on October 27 & 28th the 140 Character Conference (known as 140Conf) makes its way to Los Angeles. This is a travelling conference that most recently appeared in New York and after Los Angeles it will be making its way to London.

Here’s how Jeff Pulver (its creator) describes it:

At the #140conf events, we look at twitter as a platform and as a language we speak. Over time it will neither be the only platform nor the only language. #140conf is not an event about  microblogging or the place where people share twitter “tips and techniques” but rather where we explore the effects of the real-time Internet on Business.

I will be speaking on day 1 with several some other people that share a passion for Lifestreaming much the way I do. They include Dan Honigman who inspired the Austin Statesman project and recently released a Lifestreaming white paper, Kevin Sablan whom I’ve watched leverage Lifestreaming and its tools to help tell stories and bring us news, and Mona Nomura who has effectively used Lifestreaming tools like FriendFeed, SweetCron, Twitter and others. I’m really looking forward to joining these three great people to both educate and provide several aspects of Lifestreaming.

I recently wrote about understanding the value of Lifestreaming. In that post I discussed how I’m really looking forward to new apps and services that will provide curated content across the various services that I interact on based on my social graph. Get used to seeing the words “Curate” and “Social Graph” used pretty heavily in the year to come. I’m abusing those words and MG also mentioned them in his post.

Lifestreaming and other technologies have done a fantastic job allowing the masses generate an incredibly large amount of content very quickly. Filtering the noise is a common topic that is discussed as a problem that has resulted from this. The next evolution of Lifestreaming really needs to find ways to tackle this problem.

Which brings me back to Twitter Times. I signed up immediately after MG’s post and was lucky to recently have been provided access to the service. Look at the screenshot below from my latest issue.

Click image to view my current page

You can see that it provides a newspaper / magazine layout that lists all of the items. The items are prioritized based on the number of your followers that tweeted links to the item. The first column provides the “hot” items which appear to be more recent links with an image if available. The right column shows the top stories for a larger range of time. Overall I think this is a great service. It allows me to not worry so much about monitoring my Twitter stream for fear I might miss something. I can just leisurely pull up this page at my convenience and see what the people I follow have found interesting.

I’m sure some people may say that Google Reader is now a good platform for this with their new social features. But unfortunately the barriers are a little higher for that to be effective. It requires you to build a large group of friends on there that will also actively use the service to share items from their feeds. I just don’t see it becoming as effective as Twitter Times which gains it’s content in an arguably more effective way by tapping Twitter.

That said there are definitely some tweaks that would be nice. MG pointed out that Kevin Marks had asked if they could omit links that are sent out by us which makes sense. I would also like to see an RSS feed for the data provided so I can view it in list form if I wanted. Some more interesting tweaks would be to build custom pages based on my Twitter user lists (once that feature goes public). Also if I could add higher weight to certain people I follow. In any case this is a great effort and I continue to look forward to many more apps that take this approach to other services such as Flickr, YouTube, Delicious and the like. And if they do it from all services on one page, well then we have a curated Social Stream. I can dream right?

The Twitter Times – Video Tour from Maxim Grinev on Vimeo.