I have blogged about lifestream’s before (see Lifestreaming outside the box). I looked around for a good service to deal with creating and publishing a lifestream but haven’t been completely impressed by any of them. I had been using Lijit for a while, but it didn’t give me the ability to publish out a stream like I am doing here. It didn’t give me the ability to edit the feed title so I had this list of verbose feeds some not entirely making sense. And, as I found with most of them, they wanted to add extra junk I didn’t want, like search my feed. If you want to search my feed go to Google and limit by url.

Too much clutter.

So it had to go in and be replaced by the much cleaner list you see in the center. I publish an aggregated feed of my lifestream using Yahoo! Pipes which is perfect for this although I did look at Feed Digest to deal with this but found it’s interface muddled and I wasn’t clear what it was going to produce in the end so I went back to what I know. Probably not a fair evaluation but it is what it is.

Now for the interested, you can see everywhere I post on the Lifestream page. Not really I limit it to six of my most used feeds and I limit the web page to only display the last three days. If you are interested in what I posted older than that subscribe to the feed.

This is built using a brilliant PHP software package called SimplePie to manipulate the RSS feeds. If you need to parse RSS feeds, use this class.

A solution in search of a problem

I ran across a post that mentioned profilebuilder this evening. I didn’t remember checking that site out so I went over there. I remembered the site nearly immediately. It received a lot of talk not to long ago so I remember testing it out. I also remember that the first time I went creating an account didn’t work. Giving them the benefit of the doubt I held off for a few days and went back. This time I was able to get an account created but little else on the inside seemed to work.

Well today I checked it out again and everything seems to be working again. Profilebuilder lets you go in and, wait for it, lets you create your online profile. And it does what it says.

But that is where I have a problem. Why?

You put in information and they spit it back out at a fancy url. But thats it. Where is the nice FOAF file? You have my information why don’t you do something useful with it?

All right, I may be a bit harsh here. It’s a nice site that does what it claims to do and nicely assembles my online profile into one short url.

Not that my advice is worth a lot, but it’s free so do what you will with it.
This short list will make this a really great application.

1. Drop the flash. You don’t do anything that needs it and it sure gets in the way of the data being useful.
2. Generate an FOAF file with all that data.
3. Don’t ask me for more links. Ask me for the tag or group of tags to pull the links from the numerous bookmarking sites that I have already indicated I belong.
4. Provide an RSS link to my blog and networks. You asked for them. I provided them. So let’s share them.
5. Again with the photo’s. I already told you I had a flickr account. Just ask me for the tags or sets to pull in. Why reinvent the wheel? I am not uploading these things twice.

That should keep you busy. You have a slick interface to work with and a nice short domain name that I would be willing to use to share this information, but right now it isn’t much use to me or anyone else.

In tech years it seems like eons ago, but in 2003 Google purchased Pyra Labs aka blogger. Pyra Labs made an innocuous software application that made bloggin easy for the masses. Much to everyones amazement, Google has done relatively little with the software since.

Fast forward to 2007, social networks are the craze. The are popping up so rapidly no one can keep up with them all. They started out as the shiny diamond in the palm of the internet. Now the cracks are starting to form and the luster is beginning to dull. What is the problem? They all seem to forget that the social part of a social network is center on people.

This is where Google missed the boat and could be Yahoo!’s golden ticket. Google has software that is focused on the person called blogger. In general a blog is the center of ones digital life. This blog takes many forms, but its basically like a house. It’s were a person resides. Facebook or MySpace is where you go for an extended vacation, but once it’s over you want to return home. Google never advanced the blog to make it an inviting place to return.

Yahoo!, who is looking for a way to get ahead of the pack, has done so well at being a sticky site that it could build a package like I am about to describe. Using it’s huge user base to turn people away from the stove pipe social networks and embrace an open, user centered social product.

Imagine a blogging application that embraced microformats like hAtom and hCard. Sprinkle in XFN support and OpenID. Standardize trackbacks and open up comments so that I can add your comments to my conversation and exchange them back to you with a reference to my post.

No that we are pretending that a blog package like this exists lets push things a little further. So say I have photo’s and I want to share them. Let’s use Flickr as an example. So I use my OpenID to sign up to flickr, which in return provides back the detail of my blog url. Flickr checks my blog url and finds that I have a friends list in hCard format with xfn data. It pulls in all those friends and says, hey, I know some of these people. Would you like me to notify them that you are sharing photo’s? And about these individuals that I don’t know, would you like me to send them an invite to connect to your sharing feed.

By the way, did I mention that a person could just subscribe directly to a lifestream feed provided as part of my blogging service?

So know you are zipping through a results set from a search you did to find information on individuals blogging about cool blogging ideas and you found a blog you find interesting and want to add this person as a friend. A little bookmarklet titled “Add to Friends list” is nestled nicely in your browser so you add them to your friends list on your blog. Behind the scenes this is taken care of by your blogging software that pulls this persons hCard from their site.

This scenario provides ample opportunity for value added services like Flickr and YouTube, etc. but renders meaningless the need for a site like MySpace and Facebook or forces them to become more open so they can exchange data.

This post, I hope, builds on ideas from this 2006 blog post and Social Network Portability page on the microformats wiki.

Streamy is a new site in the digital life aggregator category that I just got an invite to join. I have to say that I am impressed so far. It’s in private beta, but you can request an invite on the home page.

My first impressions of Streamy are wow! It takes the good of Spokeo. Allowing me to add my feeds (one at a time or with an OPML upload), organize them and read them in a variety of layouts. In addition to this it gives me access to friends in which I can share the stories, comment on stories or even just chat with friends with the in window chat box. I can create groups as well. So all the friend interaction is there.

One key item that starts to break streamy out from the pack is the filtering on feeds. I won’t be able to do the service justice by describing it here so at the end of the post I added a webcast introduction that will knock your socks off.

I have to admit that I found the interface less than intuitive at first, but the 4 minutes it took me to watch their webcast introduction cleared it all up and pointed out to me some very exciting features.

No the interface is a little buggy, and somewhat sluggish. So sluggish in Netscape 9 that I switched to using Safari. This sped things up nicely. None of this is unexpected in a beta and certainly no bugs big enough to stop me from using it as my primary aggregator.

Maybe later I will post my thoughts on some next steps that will put this site into a classification of next generation social networks. For now I am just going to enjoy the fact that it is by far the best aggregator that I have tried.