Mark Krynsky

If you’re not familiar with Flavors.me it’s Lifestreaming service that I really like. I wrote about how it’s a great way to easily get a beautiful Lifestream built quickly. Well they have now officially launched their service and along with continuing to offer the great features available during the beta for free, they now have premium accounts with additional features.

For a mere $20 a year you can also get the following

• Custom domain
• Real time traffic stats
• Support for Clicky and Google Analytics
• A fancy Lightbox contact form

They also plan to release a more advanced layout framework, an updated members directory along with a powerful search and new browsing tools. You can take a look at my page on Flavors.me here.

If you’re headed to SXSW be sure to meet the team on Saturday March 13th at 11:15AM at the Meet the press event.

The annual pilgrimage to SXSW is upon us once again. Last year was my first time there and I had an amazing time. This year I feel a bit more prepared and plan to take full advantage of what I learned. If you’re new this year, or just want some good tips, ReadWriteWeb has created a handy list. There were plenty of complaints around coverage for iPhones but I’ve read that AT&T says their network will be ready this year. If that’s the case then you better make sure you’re prepared for the overtime usage your phone will be getting. I’ve purchased 2 iPhone 2200 mAh backup battery packs at Monoprice.com (sorry, can’t link to product page since site is down). These work great and are only $14 each. I recommend you seek a similar option for your mobile phone as well.

The SXSW website has created a nice personal scheduling section this year along with an iPhone app but I do still like the Sched.org version which offers some additional features as well as showing who else is attending panels and more. Also be sure to check out the new service by Sitby.us which aims to help you let your friends know which and exactly where you’ll be sitting at panels.

So there were 5 panels with some form of Lifestreaming proposed (one of which I was on) but unfortunately none of them got selected. Kind of a bummer since social media aggregation has really become such a dominating strategy for even the big players now. I still was able to look at the panels and find a few that are worthy of attending if you feel as letdown as I had.

Here are a few Lifestream related panels worth considering

• ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? – This appears to be a primer on what has become the leading Lifetreaming open standard adopted by many.
• Gmail: Behind the Scenes – Some of the engineers and product managers behind Google Buzz will be talking here.
• Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized? – Judging by some of the panelists there may be some Lifestreaming nuggets strewn across their talk.
• The Life Graph: You Are Your Location – While sounding like an LBS talk the description mentions what could be some interesting topics around Lifestream data.
• Time + Social + Location. What’s Next In Mobile Experiences? – Description a bit vague but may offer something interesting.
• Engines of Sociality: 2010 and Beyond – “…transformative technologies and paradigms on the horizon in 2010 that will power the new augmented sociality, including the social filtering, personalization, and contextualization of real-time messaging.” Could be interesting.
• Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web & Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends & also Search Patterns: Tangible Futures for Discovery – May offer some thoughts on Lifestream data and search.
• 2010: The Year We Broadcast Our Credit Card – Thoughts on Lifestreaming and privacy.

So as you can see there’s still a few topic based talks that should offer some insight into were Lifestreaming is today and where it may be going. Last year there was also an Activity Streams meetup at the end of one of the days and I’ve heard they’re planning another one. Also, I’ll be attending the Mashable party which is being sponsored by the very good Cliqset Lifestreaming service.

But I also know that many of these discussions will also occur in the hallways where I had many good ones last year. In fact last year I was glad to have met many great people including readers of this blog whom I talked to about Lifestreaming. I look forward to more of the same this year so if you happen to see me wandering around please say hello. You can check out my profile on the SXSW site or on Sched.org so that we can connect. You can also see many places I’ll be headed to on Plancast or better yet stalk me on FourSquare, Gowalla, or Brightkite along with Twitter.

It has become a very common trend to use Minority Report as a reference whenever referring to interactive visualization interfaces. I came across a video that takes this approach and applies it to Lifestreaming. As soon as I started to watch it I knew it looked familiar to me. That’s because I wrote about it a year ago. The video was created by the Vodafone Group’s user experience / concept development group.

click image to view on YouTube and select 1080p & expand the view for awesomeness

I decided to repost this not only because it’s a very cool video showing some unique interactive visualizations, but because it was reposted in glorious 1080p HD goodness on YouTube. I’m embedding it below for convenience but I recommend watching it on YouTube and making sure you select the 1080p option and expand its size. Just like when we see concept cars at auto shows, I’m wondering how far out these types of user interfaces are.

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The FFundercats Podcast is a show run by FriendFeeders Josh Haley and Johnny Worthington where every week they discuss the service often with various users from FriendFeed as their guests. They’ll discuss the service itself but also delve into the users of the community and what interesting things they shared or discovered over the course of the week. It’s a great show because Johnny (an Aussie with attitude) and Josh (a kickass ukulele player) are cool people that don’t take the show too seriously and enjoying have fun on there. That’s exactly what I found when I joined them last week.

We started the show discussing the FriendFeed outage from the night before. Johnny took issue with MG Siegler’s post and joking stab during the outage. I personally didn’t pay much mind to it and didn’t get caught up in any drama. You can hear both my viewpoint and Johnny’s on this but lets just say that I try not to pay much attention or waste energy arguing the value of a service for myself because I’d much rather spend that time constructively with the users who have already embraced it.

We go on to a much funner and lighthearted topic after that…Olympic Curling. We discuss our collective excitement over its coverage and even take turns coming up with some pretty interesting and innovative ways that the sport could evolve into something much better funner to watch.

We talk about this and plenty more. You can stream it below or visit their site to download MP3 versions or subscribe to their podcast on iTunes.

I read this post over at MakeUseOf.com titled “How To Create Your Own Lifestream On A Wordpress Blog In 3 Easy Steps”. This is a good tutorial and utilizes the very popular Simplepie RSS framework which I’ve written about many times that has been used to create custom Lifestreams. However I wouldn’t call this exactly easy. If you want to get a nice pretty feature rich Lifestream up in Wordpress I still recommend the Wordpress Lifestream Plugin as the easiest method.

This How to is very good and offers nice details on how to configure Simplepie and customize a page in Wordpress to create your Lifestream. However it requires editing PHP code and messing with Wordpress templates, so if you’re comfortable with that, then this How to is right up your alley.

From the post

First of all, you’ll need some plugins for your Wordpress blog.  Remember that if you have a current installation of Wordpress, you can install these plugins directly from the “Install Plugins” section of the Admin of your Wordpress blog.  I will also link to the plugins’ pages so you can get an idea of what to search for and how to install them.

• SimplePie Core (needed for “SimplePie” plugin for Wordpress)
• SimplePie plugin for Wordpress
• Exec-PHP (gives you the ability to run PHP code in text widgets, posts and pages)

via MakeUseOf.com | How To Create Your Own Lifestream On A Wordpress Blog In 3 Easy Steps

I have seen several themes that take a slightly different approach to Lifestreaming where instead of simply providing a reverse chronological output of all the items from your stream, they segregate the output. I quite like this approach because many times if you post infrequently to some services they get lost quickly, never to be found again. With a segregation method you can highlight specific feeds regardless of the last time you published to them.

Aggregator provides this functionality and while it’s not a theme specifically designed for Lifestreaming, it can easily be adapted for it. It provides a display approach very similar to Alltop or Popurls. It’s powered by Simplepie so you know its feed handling is going to be solid. Lastly this is a free theme so it’s definitely worth checking out.

Here are some of the features it provides

• Widget based layout – add as many feeds as you want using one single widget again and again.
• Specify post count on each feed.
• While aggregating feeds for image / video site, you have an option to display the feeds as images or post titles.
• Aggregate feeds of any kind – blog posts, flickr images, video or audio
• On hover of the feed news titles, further snippet of the article is displayed
• 2 detailed colorschemes
• Drop-down menu
• Normal blog, single post and page layouts, comments are also well designed.

Also be sure to check out Livetwit which is another neat theme specifically built for a Twitter user or search results output.

via Aggregator – all your feeds at your website front. | Templatic.

I was notified by reader Greets Wout from Holland that he’s created a blog that covers Lifestreaming. You can find his site at Lifestreamen.nl

Keep in mind that the site is written in Dutch but utilizes the Wibiya toolbar which you can find at the bottom where there is a translate button for English and several other languages.

I recently came across this page over at Moby Games for a PC game called Lifestream. It was a game created by Christopher M. Brendel and released in 2004 by Unimatrix Productions. According to its description page it was a 1st person adventure with detective / mystery elements, horror, and puzzle solving.

Here’s the full description

Father Randolph Holton, a Catholic priest, has disappeared. The son that no one knows about, John, goes to his father’s home to search for him. He soon learns that his father had become obsessed by something he called the Lifestream. To find his father he must also dive into the haunting, terrifying truths that seduced him. What on earth is the Lifestream and how could it have caused his father’s disappearance?

At first you play John in the present as he searches through his father’s notes and his house (inside and outside) to discover his whereabouts. As the game progresses, travel back in time to play Father Holton.

There are many adventure type puzzles to solve in this point-and-click game. You’ll find other characters to talk to and objects to find and use in this haunting adventure.

It sounds pretty interesting and I wouldn’t mind actually giving it a go. Too bad it’s so hard to find.

Mark Philpot spent quite a bit of time testing several different Lifestreaming apps including Sweetcron, Kakuteru, and a few other custom scripts. He ended up being fairly happy with the Lifestream plugin for Wordpress but wanted to create a more customizable view. So he decided to write some custom PHP code to do just that.

Click image to view Mark’s Lifestream using this script

His code utilizes the Lifestream plugin for Wordpress to pull data stored by it in the Wordpress database. Then he’s added quite a few nice features:

• Attractively display your lifestream by event type
• Supports jQuery plugin imgPreview for posts with a thumbnail entry in the feed
• Supports jQuery plugin lightbox for Flickr images
• Supports ContentFlow (Cover Flow implementation) to display vi.sualize.us images
• Supports AJAX retrieval of more history for each event type

He’s provided the source code for it here and you can read more about it here.

It was at the LA 140Conf where I first heard about how MySpace was really focusing heavily on Lifestreaming. They have continued to push forward on this path and amidst the departure of Monica Keller, who was the catalyst for delivering it, they keep moving forward.

I saw over on TechCrunch that MySpace has apparently quietly unleashed Streams (what they’re calling their Lifestreaming feature) onto profile pages. They’re doing this quietly without a formal announcement perhaps to see how it performs, is received, and if any problems are encountered (take note Google re: Buzz).

Below I’ve taken a screenshot of my page highlighting some of the features

From the TechCrunch Post

The idea is to hit users over the head with new stuff when they come to MySpace. New people they should be meeting. Movie trailers they should watch. Games they may want to play perhaps against other MySpace users, music they should listen to, articles they should read. Etc. The activity stream that MySpace recently launched will be the backbone of Discovery, but other MySpace products will feed into this as well.

Then after hearing about this release I read over at Billboard that MySpace has quietly begun testing a new “In-Stream” ad unit which will be placed at the bottom of these new stream pages. So apparently this rollout seems to have been released tied to a monetization strategy from the beginning. This will be interesting to monitor as it’s the first time I’ve seen an ad strategy released around a Lifestream.