I stumbled across Stowe Boyd’s write up on a service called Lijit. It’s a fantastic application that, given just your blog url, does a fantastic job of finding all the services that you belong to. It then provides a widget that you can place in your site with some various configuration options for display to show all the services you use.

The auto-discovery as part of the sign-up process is just remarkable.

This is a tool that makes it simple to aggregate your online identity. Place it on your blog and now it is simple to share with anyone that wants to stay connected to you.

This is a fantastic service I urge everyone to give it a try.

If you haven’t heard about Profile Builder you may want to check it out. Profile Builder is, simply put, a place to aggregate your profile information. I can add photo’s, a short bio, host a resume, link to my blog or other “networks” and it aggregates them all together in one spot with one url.

I love the concept but the current Beta is much rougher than you would expect an application to be. About all I was able to do is create an account and it took a while before that was even working. It may use Internet Explorer only features, but I didn’t take the time to check and I won’t. I use a Mac. I checked it in both Safari and Firefox with the same results.

I recommend checking it out because the concept is great. But don’t get your hopes up that it is a place to aggregate your profile, because most of it just doesn’t work.

The idea of aggregating your profile information is great. What I don’t understand is why companies like this don’t give me a way to locate my contacts profile’s. They know who they are so make it easy for me to find them. Spokeo is another company that let’s me enter in your information but then doesn’t tell me if you have any other RSS feeds that I would like to subscribe to. The information is there, why not let me use and make my life easier.

Now this is the ultimate application. Combine Profile Builder with Spokeo, add in a way for me to discover my contacts profile and feeds, since you have it if they have an account. Polish it up. Now that would be a fantastic service that provides real value without all the clutter of MySpace and Facebook.

Maybe I have been thinking about the killer application the wrong way.

Consider this Jeff Croft’s lifestream:

To borrow a phrase I first heard from the Scobelizer, its like a river of data. Most recent activity at the top and then the rest in a descending list.

What we really need is a service that allows an individual to create their lifestream. Add the important part missing from Jeff Croft’s life stream, RSS.

Update:  Jeff Croft’s lifestream does have an RSS feed. (link)

So you have a service that will let you collect your life stream data into one space. For instance, I use del.icio.us for bookmarks, Flickr for photo’s, and Wordpress for blogging. I would add those three services into my lifestream.

You can send your lifestream out for friends to subscribe to. Since its formatted as RSS, they can import it into any reader the like. If they want a little more value added then you provide an interface similar to Spokeo for ingesting the lifestreams and aggregating them together.

Simplicity with value added services is what people want.