Library clips

The other day I posted on FeedEachOther, which is a fully fledged social network RSS Reader.

In the past I have mentioned Spokeo, which changed to HypeIt, which has now changed back to Spokeo.

It’s an RSS Reader for social networks, or can be used as a regular RSS Reader, but unlike FeedEachOther it’s not a social network itself…you can’t visit other user spaces, share links, leave comments, etc…

But what you can do is bring another Spokeo user to you, that is, you can subscribe to the feed of a Spokeo user.

Recap
- easy subscription to heaps of social networks; instead of finding the feed to your friends YouTube account, you can just enter your YouTube username and it will add all your friends…now you can keep an eye on them from within Spokeo
- otherwise enter a friends URL or upload an OPML file

So it can be used as a regular RSS Reader, but it’s designed to keep updated on friends from all your social networks.

You can also group friends and your feeds (basically folders)

When you add another Spokeo user, it becomes a subscription in your subscription set, when you click on this you are seeing a stream of their account, ie. you are seeing what that Spokeo users friends are all up to.
You can even limit to see just YouTube stuff from another Spokeo users stream, etc…

My lifestream post mentions a few services that are RSS Readers focused on keeping updated on friends from all your social networks (some of these are even social networks themselves).

Whereas a lifestream is one spot where you aggregate all your profiles into one stream, I use Ziki.

I guess there is nothing stopping someone adding all their profiles into Spokeo, but then you don’t need to keep updated on yourself do you, this would only help others who would subscribe to your Spokeo space.

Spokeo is about keep updated on all your friends, not making a lifestream, which friends can then subscribe to. This would be on the onus of each person to make a lifestream, whereas Spokeo is easy, just collect all your friends from social networks…only it’s missing the feature of viewing content by person (if this feature was available, then it would be like you making on-the-fly lifestreams of your friends).

Feedback

- be able to just add a selection of friends from eg. YouTube into Spokeo
- be able to view content by friend (now it’s only by network type)

Spokeo is handy as you are almost making a lifestream of your friends (only as mentioned, you can’t view stuff by friend).

In a prefect world, everyone would have a lifestream and you could just subscribe to their feed in your regular RSS Reader…so instead of subscribing to someones blog feed, we are subscribing to their lifestream feed.
But could we then view the content of a lifestream feed by content type, I don’t think so, this is what’s good about Spokeo. Also the fact that Spokeo allows you to subscribe to another person’s RSS Reader.

Lifestream OPML

Hold the phone, I’ve not only got a Ziki lifestream feed, but I have a Ziki lifestream OPML, see them at my subscription page.

Now take an RSS Reader like BlogBridge, this fancy RSS Reader can subscribe to an OPML (not bulk importing feeds), but actually subscribing to the OPML.
Any changes to this OPML will reflect in your subscription of it in BlogBridge, ie. if the owner deletes all the feeds in this OPML, then this will also happen to your bookmark of it in BlogBridge (there is a manual override if you want to reject changes).

Anyway, I could subscribe to the Ziki OPML of 10 Ziki friends, when I click on the OPML of a friend in BlogBridge, I will then be presented with a feed for each network or service that friend belongs to, then I can start reading content…see my Ziki OPML in Grazr.

In essence this is doing the reverse of Spokeo, I can read content by person, then by content type, whereas in Spokeo I can read content by content type only.

Now what I can’t do with BlogBridge (and not that I should be able to, I’m just using BlogBridge as an example), is be able to view another person’s BlogBridge RSS Reader, or like Spokeo be able to subscribe to the OPML of another person’s BlogBridge RSS Reader.

NOTE: Grazr is not a traditonal RSS Reader, but what you can do is bookmark 10 of your friends Ziki Lifestream OPML’s in Grazr and then someone else can grab your Grazr OPML and subscribe to that in BlogBridge.
In this example the 10 friend OPML’s are includes in the bigger Grazr OPML.

This is something Ziki could get into, at the moment it’s mainly about lifestreaming (and also people tag search), but what about instead of just viewing another person’s Ziki space or adding them as a friend, you could click on a friend in your friends list and read their content (this would be basically subscribing to their Ziki OPML).

Ziki also allows you to add your RSS Reader OPML Reading List, so this could allow you to subscribe to the OPML of a Ziki friends Reading List.

Perhaps Ziki could use Grazr as a light way to do this; for every friend you have added you can click a link to read their Ziki OPML in Grazr…and for when someone visits your user space they could view your Reading List with Grazr.

In the post, People Vertical Search and Personal Network Clouds or is it all just attention, I mentioned that services like Ziki are great as you can search your stuff and even search your friends stuff, but this requires people to create Ziki lifestreams otherwise it won’t work.
Well, the concept of Spokeo kind of helps out here as you can go and aggregate all your friends stuff without them requiring to have a lifestream.

[ADDED 22/07/07: Group lifestreams with Ziki Groups]

[ADDED 22/07/07: Friendstreams]

[ADDED 22/07/07: Lifestream Groups]