This story broke on the All Facebook website earlier today. Here’s a snip:

Another big upgrade from Facebook: the company is currently testing search results which display articles ranked by likes. Additionally, the results for searches now shows the results from all around the web based on two things: the number of likes and the number of friends who liked that object…

While this is a nice start, I’d like to see them leverage this somehow into the newsfeed. I don’t want to have to search to see what my Facebook friends are liking on the web. There is so much that we miss on a daily basis coming across our streams and newsfeed and it would be great to utilize this highlighted content in a more prominent place for us to visit daily. That is why I’m such a fan of Twitter Times because I don’t have to monitor Twitter constantly to see what my friends are sharing. I understand that this is a shot at Google but I hope they expand this out.

This is just another example of how services will continue to utilize our social graph to highlight content for us. I continue to see this happening in many places and look forward to seeing some more services come online that will take this approach but expand to multiple services and put some more logic and interesting UI’s to display the content for us.

via All Facebook – BREAKING: Facebook Now Displaying All Liked News Articles In Search Results

It currently supports aggregating your data from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr, and RSS feeds. They will be releasing an update within a few weeks to add Last.fm and LinkedIn. This will be the second update since the extension was released just a few weeks ago so it seems to be getting some nice attention.

Here’s a few of the features they list:

The extension does cost $24 but includes future updates and support. below is an overview video and you can visit the product page here.

In this case you need to find ways that you can have that data backed up locally and accessible to you if the service doesn’t archive older data or makes it difficult get it. This post covers several options that include the ability to backup Twitter, Facebook and other services as well.

WordPress & Drupal

I personally have been using the WP Lifestream Plugin on my personal WordPress blog for the last few years. This plugin allows me to import data from 40 services including Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and even generic RSS feeds. Once you add these services it then creates individual records for every item each time it imports data.  This in turn is then creating records for the data in your WordPress database. I periodically will export my WordPress MySQL database to my local machine which at that point provides me with an archive of all my social media data generated from the services I’m importing. This is a good way to do this fairly painlessly if you already have a WordPress blog.  If you only want to backup Twitter then another good plugin you can use is Twitter Tools.

Admin Screen for WP Lifestream Plugin

If you are a Drupal user then there are 2 modules that are similar to the Lifestream plugin above that you can use. The first is Activity Stream which is very similar but supports a lower number of services but does include Twitter and Facebook. The second is Feeds which is not specific to services, just RSS feeds but is much more flexible and powerful.

There are many other blogging platforms out there that I’m sure offer extensions to do this as well so if you’re not using either of these you should research similar options which should be available.

Backupify

This service originally started out a few years ago called Lifestream Backup with a focus specifically to backup your social media data. Besides backing up Twitter and Facebook it has since matured quite a bit and branched out to cover many other services including Gmail, Google Apps, and Basecamp. It’s really easy to setup, just create an account and link up your services. Once you’ve set up what you want to back up you can set the frequency to daily or weekly. The system will then create individual backup files of several different pieces of data from the service you connect. For instance in the case of Twitter you will get daily backups of your tweets, mentions, friends and more. The individual files are in XML format so you could open them up in a browser, editor, or Excel if you wanted to do manipulate the data. Beyond that they also offer a PDF of the backup data that provides a very nicely organized way to review your Twitter data.

PDF Generated by Backupify

Google Reader

If you want to get a little more technical and aren’t afraid to delve into the world of RSS then you open up a whole world of possibilities when it comes to what you can do with your Twitter and any other accounts that provide feeds. Unfortunately Facebook is locked out of this method as they don’t provide any feeds of your data at the current time. One of the simpler and more powerful ways is to pull your feeds into Google Reader. This is my favorite, and arguably best RSS reader available based on the archiving, search and social features available within it.

Twitter Feed Search Results in Google Reader

Link to Twitter RSS Feed

In the case of Twitter you first have to locate your RSS feed. This is fairly simple. Just login to Twitter and click on your profile link. You will now see all of your tweets and if you look on the lower right hand side just below the list of people you are following, you will see that very recognizable little orange icon with a link to your RSS feed. Note that there are feeds for your tweets and favorites only but not DM’s, mentions, or retweets. Now go add that feed to your Google Reader account and now you will be archiving your tweets there and for an added bonus they will be searchable. I’m not sure of how far back they will archive your tweets but in doing a test for this post I was able to use a search term to find a tweet from December of 2008.

Lifestream Software & Services

All of the above options offer some pretty straightforward approaches but beyond them there are many other options available with varying degrees of these features in the form of software and services available for Lifestreaming. FriendFeed provides similar functionality to Google Reader with regards to archiving whatever feeds you import and allowing you to search them, although you won’t be able to export the data. Storytellr & SweetCron are open source platforms you can install yourself which similarly to WordPress will store your data as records in their database. If you want to build an engine to backup and output your data in even more flexible ways there are many Yahoo Pipes options I have found. You can see a full list of all the software, services, and tools I’ve compiled for Lifestreaming here.

Bonus link

If you’re looking specifically for methods to backup Twitter I want to share this roundup that Sarah Perez created over at ReadWriteWeb of several other good options as well

Brian Frank Likestream

Over the last few months I had shifted my thoughts from the methods we aggregate and display our personal lifestream data to better ways to consume the data we are all putting out there. When I went to SXSW back in March of this year I shared my thoughts about this with many of the people I know who are developers, startups, and the like in the lifestreaming / data aggregation sector. I got a warm reception from many of the folks I spoke to about this topic and even had a discussion with Robert Scoble, Mona Nomura, and Mark Rizzn while I was over there.

Here’s an excerpt from that talk that discusses this topic:

When I returned from SXSW I put my thoughts at the time into a post discussing how to build a content reader that displayed all the information my friends were sharing. Over the last year we’ve started to see a huge surge in tools and services that allow us to share objects we like socially and we’re seeing large numbers of users adopting them. So I think the data to help fuel this type of reader is actually starting to get even better. There are several key things I can point to that I feel are propelling the movement of fine tuning all of us into effective content sharing recommendation engines.

A big shift in the tide came when Facebook released the “Like” button, back in April. While it seems very simple it provided a major mental shift for all of us moving from the verb Fan to Like. This would also set the stage to allow us to easily create “Like” touch points for almost any content on the web that would proliferate beyond Facebook like wildfire. This universal button and gesture has created a simple and effective way for us to highlight content making it much easier than using functionality which differs and is isolated when you do it natively on a service.

Another method that is providing us with the ability to share in new ways is the action of checking in or sharing  what we’re doing besides just locations which Robert discussed in the interview above. There are several services that are pioneering this including GetGlue, Miso, and Hot Potato which was just bought by Facebook. You can get a good comparison of these services on a recent post by Digi Jeff here. I’ve just recently started to experiment with Getglue and their mobile app now available on Android as well as iPhone. In the case of Getglue I can get recommendations based on my like activity and I can view the activity and likes of friends on their profile pages. There’s also a stream page where I can view activity, but I can’t get a well organized aggregated view of all likes based on media types on a single page from the people I follow which I feel could make for a more compelling page.

Recently Flipboard got a lot of attention because they provided a beautiful interface to view the content generated by those you follow on Facebook and Twitter. While this was nice, you can’t define the logic used to display the content based on the popularity of multiple friends sharing something or any other filters to customize who’s content you want to view. I mention Twitter Times (my page) often as a tool I use daily that does offer me a view based on the number of friends linking to a story or other piece of content. There are also other tools that provide interesting ways to consume content shared by friends that are coming like Paper.li (my page)

My Paperli page

Creating more ways to share all the things we consume and like is definitely something that will continue to evolve across the web. This is definitely an area that will get traction as there are huge monetization strategies that can be applied to this data we’re generating. Pair this new age of liking with the ability to break down content by media types, categories, social graph, influence and other variables and you will see some very compelling things coming from this data soon.

From the post

The standard, known as Activity Streams, aims to solve the problem that FriendFeed–acquired by Facebook a year ago, but largely stagnant since then–was supposed to fix: bringing together what your friends are doing from all over the web. They may be posting pictures to Flickr and Picassa, microblogging at Twitter, liking things of Facebook, recommending articles at their favorite news sites, etc. It's a firehose of information that you should be able to filter intelligently–and, more importantly, add to as easily as you add a new RSS feed to your reader or a new mailing list to your email inbox.

via Technology Review: Blogs: Mims’s Bits: ‘Activity Streams’ Will Be the Glue of Your Online Life.

click image to visit my Posterous site

To change your current theme to this new one all you need to do is visit your Manage page and then click on “settings” and then click on the big “Theme and customize my site” button. Then scroll down to the theme titled “MyList” and select it. That’s it. You will now enjoy the look of your Posterous site in the way of a grid of pretty thumbnails displaying your posts.

Federated Social Web Summit Logo

Status.net has organized a Federated Social Web Summit to occur on July 18th, 2010 in Portland Oregon. Before you get too excited, this is a private and invite-only event for active groups developing code specific to federation of the web. The goal of the summit is for the teams working on initiatives to discuss their current work and plan for future co-operation between each other.

Status.net CEO Evan Prodomou describes federation as “just means letting people on different social networks follow each other”. He goes on to say “There are dozens of businesses and Open Source projects working on the problem of social network federation. We want to make sure that people are working together so a robust, heterogeneous network-of-networks can emerge.”

In May I wrote about how we need an open and federated social network and I’m glad to see this event being organized. I hope these groups can work together to create a foundation for this effort to progress smoothly and quickly as we will all benefit by this in the long run.

From the Status.net post:

Invitees to the event include StatusNet, Google Buzz, Diaspora, GNU Social, DiSo, BuddyPress, Dreamwidth, Onesocialweb, and others. “Were focusing only on committers: people and organizations whove put code on the table to make federation work,” says Jon Phillips, StatusNet Community Director. “In the future, well need to coordinate marketing and promotion of the federated social web, but this event is about making code work.”

via Federated Social Web Summit 2010 Announced | StatusNet.

Image courtesy of Superfeedr post on Federating PubSubHubbub

But this post isn’t to talk about that as I feel many have covered this topic very well. My interest really got piqued when I started to see many people get excited about a new project called Diaspora that was announced last week. This Facebook incident became the catalyst for a group to create in their words “an open source social network”. This team created a site with some basic information about their goals and asked for 10k in donations to help them get started. Word of their endeavor spread like wildfire and got a good dose of fuel when Leo Laporte deleted his Facebook account and announced giving a $100 donation to the Diaspora team. They have raised over $176k as of this writing.

It’s nice to see the attention that the Diaspora project is getting and specifically the plight of creating a decentralized and distributed open source social network. Unfortunately I don’t think that this team is the proper group to head up such an endeavor and I’m not alone with this sentiment either.

Chris Saad wrote a piece that captured my thoughts and feelings the closest. His post describes his personal experiences trying foster adoption of the DataPortability project and the roadblocks he encountered along the way to provide the real-world challenges the Diaspora team will face.

He takes the Diaspora spotlight as an opportunity to highlight what really needs to happen with this statement:

I think we need more fresh, independent voices generating hype and attention for the idea that an open alternative to Facebook can and must exist. Their success in capturing people’s imagination only shows that there is an appetite for such a thing.[Regarding Open Standards]… We all need to do our part to embed them into every project we’re working on so that peer-to-peer, interoperable social networking will become a reality.

Alex Wilhelm over at TheNextWeb took a different approach by breaking down the reasons why Diaspora is not the answer. Stating that their system will be too complex, points to why it won’t easily guarantee the privacy concerns that fueled the project, and questions whether people would be willing to pay for it. But ultimately he sees their endeavor as a positive one and wishes them the best of luck.

Lastly Jason Fried over at 37Signals took the brutally honest approach and calls their recent attention a curse. He points to the fact that they have now raised too much money, the spotlight is on them much too early, and the expectations are too high.

I agree with all 3 of these posts. I have watched Lifestreaming services progress for over 3 years now which in many ways have attempted to achieve what the Diaspora team is trying to do. I think having a system that allows us to tie together multiple web services we pick from a menu to post content in an aggregated fashion and tie in friends across these services in a seamless way is the end game.

Many talented teams have tried and failed at this with the closest team to do it being FriendFeed. I was one of the first users of FriendFeed and followed the site’s development and growth very closely. I made it a point to try and read all news written and listen to interviews with their founders.

The Facebook situation reminded me of several times that I recalled FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit discussing the need for an open and federated system to take FriendFeed to the next level. I remember when I attended his panel at SXSW in 2009 where he discussed this along with folks from Microsoft and the soon to be suitor Facebook.

I was able to dig up and re-listen to this Gillmor Gang podcast I remembered featured an interview with Paul Buchheit where around 7 minutes into the podcast he says the following:

“I think in the long term if what we are building here [referring to FriendFeed] is actually as important as we believe it is, it’s going to need to be an open and federated sort of system where there is multiple participants.”

It was a few months after this podcast that Facebook came in and bought FriendFeed. It almost makes me think that not only did Facebook want to acquire the talent from FriendFeed, but also diminish any further possibility of them making progress on an open and federated social network.

So where does that leave us now? Well I still think that as much as I and many other folks like the freedom and ability to totally customize your own social network in the way Lifestreaming services allow us to, it’s just currently an impossible task to simplify it for the mainstream. As bad as it may seem to have all the features and functionality controlled by a single entity like Facebook, it’s the simplicity, integration, and elegance that captures the mainstream and I’m sad to say it’s going to be a long time if ever before an open standards federated platform can be built in a meaningful way to compete with that.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t continue working towards this goal and I’ll be the first to be a cheerleader for those working on this endeavor. In fact ever since the Diaspora team has been gaining notoriety, I’ve been trying to swing the attention to the similarly focused OneSocialWeb project which I think is much more deserving of the spotlight. It was created by the proven development team of the very popular Storytlr Lifestreaming service which they released as open source to turn their attention to this project. You can read my post with information about their project to learn more.

Below you will find details from several folks I recently came across who have covered how they manage their Lifestreaming data flows. They discuss the services they use and other details about how they process the data. It’s good to learn how others are doing this to see if you can glean some new insight to learn new tricks or optimize the way you manage your flow.

Mickey Mellen has written a great post titled Organize Your Digital Life 6 – Streamline your Lifestream which summarized a more detailed post he had written previously on reorganizing his Lifestream.

Mickey Mellen's Data Flow

Andreas Gohr wrote a post in response to someone asking how to organize your Lifestream. His post titled How my web 2.0 Lifestream works provides his method.

Andreas Gohr's Data Flow

Justin Korn issues a demand in his post Manage your social network flow…NOW! He discusses a common problem where you need to pay attention to how you syndicate content to avoid duplication and other issues.

No Data Flow from Justin so here's a cool photo of him

Louis Gray has gone through several iterations of his data flow and has blogged about several of them. His latest version was detailed in a post titled The new 2010 Social Media data flow, with Buzz where he covers how Google’s new service gets added into the mix.

Louis Gray's Data Flow

Steve Rubel provided covered his three point system discussing how he captures, processes, and then shares and connects the data in his Lifestream workflow post.

Steve Rubel Data Flow

Hopefully reviewing these examples have proved to be helpful and offer some new ways for you to think about how to manage your Lifestreaming data flow. I look forward to providing more information on this topic as it seems to really need more discussion around it.

I’ve been using Pubwich at my site for a little while now and like the way it’s run. It’s neither easy to setup nor pain-free to get your services displayed but with a little knowledge of PHP you’ll be ready to go. Currently Pubwich supports Delicious, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Readernaut, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, and RSS. The latest release supports GitHub and Gowalla as well, although not yet listed on it’s main site.

Pubwich is very young, in that not many sites are running it and the developer community seems to consist of only the author: Rémi Prévost. But I feel it’s got massive potential in the lifestream market. Rémi has appeared to include many great features. For one, extendability, each service is a self contained file allowing additional services to be added very simply. Second, no need for a database. Third, caching capabilities. And finally, a structured configuration file.

As I said earlier the editing the information isn’t very straight forward. But opening the configuration file you’ll see some preloaded items and by following those items, you’ll have your lifestream setup in no time. Opening up the default template and you’ll get a small idea of how to structure your custom look.

click to enlarge

Now for my experience with Pubwich. As I said, setup wasn’t crazy simple but it wasn’t difficult either. Pubwich is best to be looked at (at this point in time) as a lifestreaming script as opposed to a framework. You’ve got to root around in the config file and template files to get your lifestream working. As the development of the service proceeds, I’d love to see an install script and a configuration GUI that will allow for easier editing of the services and various options as opposed to running through the config file. Once I got the script setup, I looked at the design and messed with the CSS to get it styled the way I wish. But I wasn’t quite happy.

The built-in system for Last.fm was limited. It only allowed for top albums and top tracks. I didn’t care for this. I want to show people my latest Loved Tracks. So I dug into the Last.fm service file. I found out how to grab a different stream through Last.fm’s API and how to get an image for that track as well. After that, I had a nice stream from Last.fm, but I couldn’t get it to run through the cache system. Not a big problem, but one I’m waiting on a little support to solve. After that I messed with the Vimeo stream as well to get it working as I wanted. Same result. Not complete change, but I’m happy with the results.

Lastly, Rémi has released a new version with added features and more. But the latest release broke many of my custom usage issues (services still work, but the way I have it integrated into my site has failed). So I’ve had to roll back to a previous version so that I can run it the way I want. I’ll see if I can get the new version up and running soon.

My experience with Pubwich has been pretty good, and it does what I want it to. I’d love to see some work on an interface to make adding/moving/changing services simpler for the average user. I’d also love to see the option of integrating Pubwich into a database or even a flat-file that backups the items in which Pubwich streams in. I hope to see more developers jump on the code to spruce it up. I’m a horrible PHP coder, but I may just do what I can to improve the code.

Reasons to use Pubwich:

• Open Source
• Compartmentalized Lifestream
• No Database
• Help Improve your PHP Knowledge

Reasons to avoid Pubwich:

• You want something easy to setup and use
• You want your lifestream to backup your data
• You want many pre-built services
• You want a mature product

You can get Pubwich at it’s main site, and help with development at GitHub.