Library clips

I have posted on Lifestreams, which is aggregating your profiles into the one space, and also on Friendstreams, which is a way to keep up with all your friends lifestreams.

This comes in two flavours, most lifestream services are a social network, so you can add your friends and keep up with their lifestreams.
But just say they don’t have a lifestream in the same service you have a lifestream, well then you can use a friendstream service to collect all your friends profiles and kind of make a lifestream for each of them in order for you to keep up with all their content in the one space.
This is a great idea as you don’t have to rely on your friends making their own lifestreams, you do it yourself.

So we have lifestreams (with friendstream features) and DIY friendstreams, and next we have Group streams.

You could say a friendstream is a group stream of your friends, but this is from your personal outlook…what about if you and some select friends all agree to put your lifestreams on one page, then this is a group stream.

Ziki Groups

Ziki has lifestreams, and you can add friends, but it only adds avatars, you can’t see a friendstream.

But it still delivers, as Ziki groups is basically a homepage that streams several lifestreams into one stream, ie. lots of people’s lifestreams on the one page.

I suppose you could use any Lifestream service to make a group lifestream, instead of entering your personal feeds from various places, just enter all your friends lifestream feeds.

eg. john uses afeeda, abby uses ziki, rich uses correlate.us, rebeka uses mugshot and Shay uses iStalkr…so you grab these 5 feeds and enter them into one of these services eg. afeeda…there you have it a DIY group lifestream.

Mugshot Groups

Mugshot has lifestreams and also friendstreams (see your friends content on your page).

Like Ziki it also has groups, one space to stream many users, you are even able to add external feeds, also able to share outside links via a bookmarklet (this is called Swarm).
You can comments on items, group chat, even chat on items

This kind of makes it like a community, without being formal, as the community content is just aggregated content from each person’s lifestream from the network.

It reminds me of a Tangler group…Tangler gives you a user space, and you can add friends and chat one-to-one, and you can chat in topic rooms…what Tangler isn’t about, is a personal publishing space. I guess you could even compare Tangler with Meebo Rooms.

Instead of a discussion forum approach, Mugshot groups is more about aggregating personal networks into one stream…from there you can share outside items into the stream, leave comments, chat, etc…

Basically Mugshot groups is a more dynamic Ziki Groups, instead of just being able to read the stream, Mugshot allows members to interact giving it a community feel.

Now if people in a Mugshot groups didn’t interact (chat, leave comments, share outside links), it would be like Ziki groups, an effective aggregated lifestream site…what I’m saying is if members don’t go the extra mile and participate in the group, it won’t die, it’s still good for just reading.

Like FeedEachOther (FEO) and others, Mugshot is a great way to form a group network in order to pay attention to stuff that matters, leveraging on friends, instead of doing it all yourself…the social web coming full circle.

NOTE: FEO doesn’t have groups, but you can share stuff with friends, and bookmarks your friends, so you can visit their page to see what they read and clip…this is more about feeds you read, rather then your lifestream.

Jaiku Channels

Jaiku is a lifestream, you can add friends, but these are just icons on your page…Jaiku also allows you to post content into your lifestream (actually Ziki also allows you to post content into your stream).
What makes Jaiku different, is that it’s similar to Twitter, in that it’s a presence blogging social network, so the lifestream part kind of comes second in it’s prime directive.

NOTE: also see Pownce, presence blogging and file sharing, with a difference in that you can limit some of your posts to certain friends, you have a public user space, but their isn’t a general public stream (posts you have sent to just select friends will only be able to be seen by those same friends on your public page).

Jaiku Channels have content from Jaiku members as well as re-syndicating content from external feeds.
The posts in these channels don’t appear in your personal Jaiku, this makes it quite different than Mugshot and Ziki…if people don’t post in a Jaiku Channel, it will die.

But then again it’s not quite different, as these external feeds you add to a Jaiku channel could be Jaiku lifestream feeds, so in the one place you get a lifestream group as well as group only presence posts.

In essence, perhaps Jaiku Channels and Tangler are more about topics, where as Ziki Groups and Mugshot Groups are more about people, with the latter two as long as you have a lifestream, these group streams will survive.

[ADDED 12/09/07: Streamy : Social Network RSS Reader, lifestreams and attention groups]

[ADDED 5/12/07: Plaxo Pulse is lifestreams and friendstreams, it also has groupstreams. If you make a group about the product Jajah, you’d have to get some sort of way for a machine to scan the group member lifestreams for terms like jajah, voip…in fact the Jajah group page has some tags that describe the group. At the moment you are just seeing a mashup of lifestreams of all the members, this is similar to a friendstream…the idea is for a topicstream isn’t it.]

[5/12/07: Onaswarm - lifestream, friendstream and groupstream called swarms]

[23/06/08: FriendFeed Rooms]

Related:
Blogs : the many ways “many” come together

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]

Feevy - instead of a bunch of links, we have gone to Grazing (a dynamic blogroll where you can read latest posts from blogs in your blogroll right there in your sidebar)…Feevy has a similar concept where each blog on your blogroll has an thumbnail image and latest post, a bit like the Flash with Friends Twitter badge.
See an example of a Feevy blogroll on their blog sidebar.

Crossloop - more than screensharing and file sharing, as others can take control of your computer (VNC)…see more, and related remote access. [via Profy]

Litepost - new in email [via Rev2]

Natuba - simple lifestreaming service that reminds me of SuprGlu, and Tumblr, also see correlate.us, mugshot, Life2front and iStalkr…and check out OtherEgo to organise your sites into iFrames. Here’s the list.

afeeda - lifestreaming again, only this time you have a lifestreaming category (personal), then you can aggregate feeds for a topic category, and lastly an event category, it’s a bit of RSS re-mixing mixed in with lifestreaming…and it has OPML output. [via LS]

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]

For those who want more out of Google Reader and can’t wait, check out the hacks below; among some, search within Google Reader (yeah!) and read native blog posts.

Specs

FireFox browser

Greasemonkey - Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript, see the list.

I’ve listed a few hacks below, here’s the list.

Hacks

1. Google Reader Preview Enhanced

Read native blog posts within Google Reader, no more limited by excerpt feeds as you can now read the actual page itself from within Google Reader…plus see and make comments right there within Google Reader.
You will see a preview button along the bottom of the RSS item:
eg. Add star, ShareEmail (Updated), Mark as read, Edit tags, Preview

Similar is a link to the Original article instead of having to click on the title.

2. Add a search box to Google Reader

Here’s the script

3. BetterGReader (this doesn’t require Greasemonkey)

Choice of skins (more), smart subscribe and Quick Links (more)

4. Auto-add feed to Google Reader

Bypasses the choice to add a feed Google homepage or Google Reader, directly adding to Google Reader.

5. Gbutts (this doesn’t require Greasemonkey)

Display all of your Google Services as buttons just next to your addressbar or anywhere you like it…not really exclusive to this list of Google Reader hacks, but still handy as a one click icon to launch it.

6. Google Reader + Twitter

Adds reader posts to twitter when clicked

7. Google Reader + del.icio.us

Adds reader posts to del.icio.us when clicked

You may already use the right-click deature from the FF del.icio.us add-on

8. Facebook Sharer + Google Reader

websites can be shared with Facebook friends and on a Facebook profile

9. Google Reader’s BlogThis2Me

Blog a current feed’s entry to your blog.

This is meant to enhance the BlogThis action to include other blog types, but I think Google Reader has dropped the BlogThis action feature.
Otherwise use another FF add-on called JustBlogIt.

10. Google Reader All Starred

Script to extract all links from google reader that have been starred

Once you have done this, try the OPMLify bookmarklet to generate code to wrap all these links in an OPML (to see your results, scroll down the page after you have clicked the bookmarklet..then you will have to save this code as a text file and upload it to Grazr to create an OPML URL.

11. Google Reader Checker

Checks your Google Reader for unread news

Suggests to instead use Google Reader Watcher (this doesn’t require Greasemonkey)

12. Google Reader Notifier

Shows you how many unread items you have in your Google Reader (this doesn’t require Greasemonkey)

13. Google Reader - Read by Mouse

Under the subscription pane you can turn on/off mouse mode - left click is next item and right click is previous item…middle click is a choice of share/star/open in new tab

Also check out the list of Shortcut Keys.

14. Integrate Google Reader with Gmail

Adds a “Feeds” in Gmail. When clicked, Reader’s list view is loaded on the right.

Also part of the Better Gmail FF add-on.

15. Google Reader quick hide message

Quickly hides the message displayed in Google Reader after performing renames, folder changes etc.

Also let’s not forget the handy next/previous bookmarklets, find them in your Google Reader Seeting tab under Goodies.

For those who who use the Google Toolbar, check out this hack that adds a Google Reader button to your toolbar…if the button turns green it means you have new content.

[ADDED 12/07/08: AideRSS - Filter items in Google Reader by social popularity]