Lifestreaming: First Look

I was minding my own business, when all of a sudden I came across the term lifestreaming. Despite having used Friendfeed for weeks, I had never heard the term, so I immediately investigated. Lifestreaming is creating a sort of mega profile which wraps up all of your online life. Most sites follow the same simple steps.

1. You sign up.

2. You state which other online services you use (such as delicious, Digg, Twitter and so on.

3. You decide whether these services will contribute to your lifestream.

4. You save everything and build the lifestream.

5. If you want, you republish it as a widget on your blog or website, so that people can find all the places where you have profiles online.

Simple, isn’t it? Well, it would be, if there weren’t so many tools to choose from. I’ve tried a few and these are my initial impressions:

Friendfeed - you can add quite a lot to Friendfeed, comment on things and have whole conversations. You can even fix it so that Friendfeed comments can appear on your blog. I personally find Friendfeed hard to follow, though third party tools such as Twhirl make it easier. Friendfeed has a huge following, so the chances are some of your friends are already on it.

Profilactic - this supports about 186 services (the most extensive lifestreaming tool as far as I know) and it’s simple to set up. You can also post to services by using the built in linkup with Ping.FM. And (the killer feature for me) it works with Plurk (most of the time anyway).

Iminta - this doesn’t work with quite as many services, but its filtering features are second to none. Once you have imported your stuff, you can filter by service or type of service (such as looking at all your books links) which makes it very easy to find things. (I’ve got invites for this service if you want to try it yourself.)

Swurl - this supports fewer services, but it has a nice calendar like interface for your updates. The killer feature here is that if your friends from other services are already on Swurl, then they automatically become your friends.

Stay tuned for more detailed reviews once I’ve used these sites a bit longer.