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Lifestreams are services that enable you to aggregate all your online profiles into the one central service, kind of like your web 2.0 identity or homepage.

Most of these services are social networks, allowing you to add friends, some just add friends as bookmarks, some allow you to see your friends stream within your user space.

Then there are other pure friendstream services that allow you to DIY, by creating friendstreams without your friends having to be registered.

LIFESTREAM WITH FRIENDSTREAM

Mugshot

Mugshot is a lifestream service (but I can’t see a way to add a general feed), it also doubles up as a friendstream service as I can not only add friends, and unlike Ziki, I can also see my friends stream in my space (this is called Network).

iStalkr

iStalkr is very similar to Mugshot, you have a friendstream from other iStalkrs, but you can’t create your own friendstream.

Profilactic

Like Mugshot and iStalkr you can only add friends Profilatic lifestreams and see them in your user space, it also allows you to post content like Ziki, Wink and Jaiku.

Jaiku

Jaiku is similar to presence blogging like Twitter only you can lifestream as well, you have your lifestream and a stream of you and your friendstream, as long as your friends are registered with Jaiku…so this puts it in the same boat as Profilactic, Mugshot and iStalkr.

iceflake

iceflake requires all your friends to create a lifestream, then you can keep updated when they update their various sites.

correlate.us

correlate.us requires all your friends to create a lifestream, then you can keep updated when they update their various sites.

dandelife

dandelife requires all your friends to create a lifestream, then you can keep updated when they update their various sites…also post content like Profilactic, Ziki, Wink and Jaiku.

Blueswarm

see below

readr

readr - lifestream, add friends to create a friendstream…anyone can comment on items [ADDED: 03/09/07]

intuuch

intuuch - lifestream, add friends to create a friendstream [ADDED: 24/09/07]

Plaxo Pulse

Plaxo Pulse - lifestream, add friends to create a friendstream [ADDED: 24/09/07]

FriendFeed

FriendFeed - lifestream, add friends to create a friendstream [ADDED: 08/10/07]

DIY EXTERNAL FRIENDSTREAM

Spokeo

Spokeo isn’t a lifestream, it’s a social network RSS Reader, you add your online profiles and it fetches your friends streams. So it’s an RSS Reader that has a great way of subscribing to your friends online profiles so you can keep updated from the one place.

Each users RSS Reader has a feed, so you can subscribe to another persons Spokeo RSS Reader, this is like keeping updated on the friends your another Spokeo user watches.

NOTE: FeedEachOther is different, it’s a social network RSS Reader where you can share links with your friends, and view their profiles, ie. view their RSS Reader…you can also message and comment on shared links.

Tabber

At last we have a lifestream as well as a DIY friendstream, which doubles up as contacts manager.
Tabber allows you to import your contacts and manage them as your online address book, further to this, for each contact you can see their lifestream, so I guess Tabber is a dynamic contacts manager…as they say, “an online address book…on crack”.

It’s not a social RSS Reader like Spokeo, but it’s an original DIY friendstream as your friends don’t have to register. If your friends do register you can merge their lifestream over the version you made of them.

Tabber is a manual process creating a lifestream for all your friends, Spokeo seemed to be a bit more automated, as you enter your online profiles from various services it will fetch all the friends you have at those services…very clever.

You’d think Spokeo would make a lifestream for you, since you are entering your online profiles in order to add your friends, but this is not the case. Spokeo is more an RSS Reader, where you can subscribe to someone elses Spokeo RSS Reader.

Blueswarm

Manually enter your profiles to create your Blueswarm lifestream or it will attempt to fetch yours and your friends profiles by entering user names and email accounts. The profile page is very similar to Ziki (filtered by content type), like Ziki you can add friends, but you also have an external friendstream…see more.

FriendFeed

In addition to the inhouse friendstream you can create an external friendstream by adding imaginary friends (review)

NOTE: MyLifeBrand, Fidg’t, upscoop, Profile Linker, and Loopster are similar to Spokeo in the way that it fetches all your friends from various social networks, but it only bookmarks them, you can’t see a stream of posts from your friends.

Taking it further

OK, so lifestreams are about aggregating all your profiles into the one homepage (kind of like your identity).

Following your friends lifestream (friendstream) can only happen if they are registered with the same lifestream service.

Spokeo and Tabber attempt to solve this by allowing you to create a type of lifestream for your friends manually, your friends are unaware you are even doing this…this makes Spokeo really powerful.

Going back to lifestreams, what about if all your friends have lifestreams, but they are all hosted at different services.

Naturally you need a service that aggregates lifestreams from any lifestream service, ie. it lets you aggregate a friendstream.

eg.
Shay uses Mugshot, Mike uses iStalkr, Abby uses Life2Front, Rich uses dandelife, Rebeka uses Lijit, Kerrie uses Ziki, Toni uses Jaiku, Anil uses Tumblr, Daniel uses Profilactic, Neil uses Wink, Sach uses 30boxes, Anton uses iceflake, Lara uses correlate.us, Dave uses profileomat, Claire uses Snag, Scot uses Natuba, Jade uses SuprGlu, and Ward uses Tabber…I use Blueswarm.

I could use a special Friendstream service to add lifestreams from each of these service into the one reader.

I guess you could do this with a regular RSS Reader, but a dedicated Lifestream reader would allow you to filter by content types, etc…also act as a contact manager.

For presenation purposes you could grab all your friends lifestreams feeds from whatever services they use and enter all these feeds into a lifestream service of your choice, in order to make a friendstream, or even into a Jaiku Channel (this channel would have all your friends lifestream feeds auto-posting content, and if these same friends wanted to join Jaiku, they could also post content into the stream).

Meta-profile interactor and notifier

8hands is a desktop app, so I didn’t try it out, but it seems to be both a lifestream and a way to connect to your friends from various social networks, if they are also 8apps users you can IM chat.
I think the idea is more about connection, as you can check who has commented or left a message from all your online profiles from the one spot…now that’s handy.
Minggl seems similar to 8apps.

So this is another idea for a lifestream, besides just streaming your content or streaming your friends content, or just having a friend contact list by network type what about a web-based service that allows you to keep up with who is interacting with your content.
You enter all your profiles, and then it will notify you when some messages, comments, replies, etc… to any content on any of your profiles.
Another feature would be for you to interact back from this same service, I recall ProfileLinker allowing you to send messages to friends on any network from within ProfileLinker. It also notifies of any messages from your various profiles, but you can’t read the message within ProfileLinker.

Group Lifestreams

You could grab RSS feeds from any lifestream service and make a group lifesteam or expert lifestream, but services like Ziki have this as a feature, see Group lifestreams with Ziki Groups.

But to take this further with a community feel check out Mugshot Groups.

[ADDED 3/09/07: Centre of my web 2.0 universe]