Toluu

Lifestream Blog

News, tools and resources for creating a Lifestream

Why No Calendar UI for Lifestreams?Today

One of the features I’ve always wanted from a Lifestream is a calendar feature. What I’d like to see would be a standard calendar UI to be able to navigate and drill down through a Lifestream. This would offer the ability to easily find dates and ranges that I’d want to look for. This would be good for finding trips, birthdays, or to see what we documented for other milestones that occur in our lives.

So I decided to do a quick mockup of what this feature might look like if it was built for FriendFeed. I borrowed the Google calendar and then just dropped in some ways that you could navigate through it. I chose the full month view which would primarily offer text links, but perhaps the weekly view could offer some nice thumbnail visualizations of data.

My mockup of a possible FriendFeed Calendar UI

Sure there are great timeline based Lifestreaming services such as Dipity, Lifeblob, Allofme, but they don’t offer the standard UI I’m lo

Salon Cofounder Sees Lifestreaming Becoming an Outgrowth of Blogging’s FutureJuly 2

Today I was reading the latest issue of Wired. In it is an interview with Salon Cofounder Scott Rosenberg about his new book Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters.

Rosenberg’s book researched the origins of blogging and goes on to discuss how it has become a phenomenon. Wired asks him several questions which include why did he need to write a book when a blog post would do which could have been followed with a rimshot. Other questions include whether he believes blogs have peaked, what impact Twitter has had, and what does he see the future of blogging becoming.

It is this last question that piqued my interest. Here’s the excerpt:

Wired: So what will blogging look like in 2019?

Rosenberg: The interesting outgrowth will be lifecasting. With traditional blogs, even if it’s e

Should People Kill Their Blogs in Favor of Lifestreaming?June 30

At the end of last week, Steve Rubel (a popular PR blogger) made big waves when he announced that he was replacing his blog with a Lifestream. Steve is just the latest convert to come to this decision. There has been a  long line of folks proclaiming that the blog is dying in favor of the Lifestream. In my end of year roundup for 2008 I highlighted several of those that were predicting the transiton. This included ReadWriteWeb, Wired, and Yongfook who is the author of the popular SweetCron Lifestreaming software.

Lets get this out of the way quickly. While I may be one of the biggest Lifestreaming evangelists cheerleaders out there, I still would never consider killing my blog in favor of Lifestreaming. My initial love affair with Lifestreaming was due to the efficiency and elegance of providing content I created using mu

Search for Beatiful Dynamic Visual Lifestream Pages with SpezifyJune 24

Today I discovered a new and very different search engine. Spezify is a new search tool which presents its results using beautiful visual boxes from content it discovers based on search engine results and rich media sites like Flickr, YouTube where it scours to get imagery and even finds ways to present textual content in a pretty fashion. If I had to provide a quick description that many of you would understand it would be if Google married SweetCron and this was their spawn.

Just like any new search tool the first thing you are mandated to do is a vanity search. So when I searched for my name I quickly realized that the results could easily pass as a Lifestream for me. The results included recent Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Tweets, profile descriptions and more. Now I know this may not be the case for everyone, especially depending on how common your name and its associated results may be, however I found it to be very cool in my case and think it’s worthy of trying for yourself as well.

Beyond being able to use it as a Lifestreaming search engine, you can create really nic

Squarespace to Offer Lifestreaming Functionality SoonJune 17

Yesterday I came across the Lifestream page of  Taddeo Zacchini who is a graphic designer for Squarespace where he states in the header

This is my lifestream page: a new feature that will soon be available to all Squarespace users. The whole world of social network in one place, completely customizable in all parts!

Taddeo isn’t the only only one that has been bitten by the Lifestreaming bug. Squarespace staffers Tyler Thompson and Eric Anderson have also created Lifestream pages (see below). I recently spotlighted Squarespace in one of my custom Lifestream galleries for a page they created where they aggregate the Twitter streams of several staff members (note they mention the new functionality coming on this page as well). They have also created a similar page for the staff of Revision3.

The only details I’ve been able to uncover regarding the new functionality they will be rolling out is from this post on Stephan Wetzl’s blog where he states

Squarespace will make soon a big update on V5 with releasing social widgets that let you aggregate data from across your va