Wednesday, February 20th, 2008...February 20, 2008
Lifestreams - tell my story
I have been playing with lifestreaming lately, it is pretty much means aggregating all your online activity. I used to use my site as that, but it takes more effort and I have made more of a stride to use my site as a tech and higher ed blog than personal. To learn more about lifestreaming check out the Lifestreaming blog. I have been talking to the owner of this site of the last few days about what tools he recommends and some hints.
For a bit of history the first lifestreams I was aware of were Jeremy Keith’s another early one was that of Jeff Croft., who now uses tumblr
So here are a few of the sites I have tried:
Microblogs
- Tumblr, which is technically a form of microblogging but since you can import feeds a lot of people have been using it like that.
- Jaiku is another microblogging platform that is almost identical to twitter but it accepting incoming feeds. I don’t use it.
True lifestreams
There are many more sites like these popping up. Most of these sites have an embed feature, right now I am embeding the Profilactic feed on my homepage, since it is the least flaky and supports the most sites. There are also various scripts and plugins that you can use to add a lifestream to your site.
My main problem is that I listen to so much music during the day that it looks like that is all I do. See last.fm is you don’t believe me.
Anyone else use anything similar?
Update:Facebook now plans to open up their newsfeed which is their versions of lifestreaming, interesting move.
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10 Comments
February 20th, 2008 at February 20, 2008
Plaxo* has a feature, Pulse, that gathers all my social media into one big stream. It’s pretty cool.
* I know, they used to be scary, but I think they listened to the accusations of spam and cleaned up their act.
February 20th, 2008 at February 20, 2008
Iminta doesn’t have an embeddable widget yet, but it does let you do one thing that the others don’t: You can filter out things from your feeds and get custom rss from it. So, for example, you can filter out your last.fm songs (but keep the weekly artist report).
February 20th, 2008 at February 20, 2008
Aaron, thanks for your feedback. I really like when people that create apps give feedback on blogs. It shows they actively follow and care about what people think of their product. Iminta gets a big star from me today.
February 20th, 2008 at February 20, 2008
Sweet.
February 20th, 2008 at February 20, 2008
Matt,
Thanks for mentioning Profilactic. We appreciate it.
I would like to point out that Profilactic also allows you to filter content within your mashup. Any feed that you list in your mashup can be toggled on or off.
We are also just about ready to launch a few feature enhancements including the ability to filter your friends’ content, too.
For example, if you follow someone who has great blog posts and interesting Flickr photos, but really annoying Twitter updates, you can turn the Twitter feed off for that friend. This will allow you to only get the content you care about.
Thanks again for mention.
February 20th, 2008 at February 20, 2008
I’ve been using Netvibes to “handle” my RSS addiction. I probably isn’t as focused as some of those other things, but if it has a feed then I can pull it into Netvibes and I can organize everything into tabs and categories.
February 20th, 2008 at February 20, 2008
This is different than a feed reader, but I guess similar in a way, it is where you show every thing that you do. So you probably wouldn’t actually follow it like a feed.
February 20th, 2008 at February 20, 2008
I use the feed of my friend’s stuff (and the daily email). So it outputs a feed that can be really useful to keep track of what your friends are up to. If your friends are twittering too much you can tune that stuff out with filters, which are applied to the site but also can be applied to the rss output.
February 21st, 2008 at February 21, 2008
Hi Matt,
Tried to reply yesterday, but I never saw my comment show up.
First, thanks for mentioning Profilactic. We really appreciate it.
Second, wanted to clarify that Profilactic also allows you to filter feeds out of your mashup.
We’re just about to roll out the same functionality for your friends’ stuff as well.
And third, no one supports as many sites as we do. We currently support 125 sites by default and allow you to add unlimited custom sites. I think that is an advantage we have over just about any aggregator out there.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
February 24th, 2008 at February 24, 2008
To be clear: I never have, nor do I now, use Tumblr. My lifestream is, and always has been, powered by my own code, written in Python and Django.
Cool piece, though! Thanks for including me in it. :)