One approach is to aggregate information about our and our friends' activities across all the networks we participate in at one location. Such locations are commonly called "lifestreaming applications." Two of these applications, FriendFeed and SocialThing!, have taken a particularly high profile in the past few days.

The Services

We predicted that the network of networks FriendFeed would be the breakout app of SXSW 2008. It's not clear how big an impact that event made on the service but in the days following, it's blown up. In FriendFeed, friends create accounts and add all of their independent feeds from blogs, bookmarking, music services etc. Then the service aggregates your friends' feeds into one concise stream. It currently supports 28 services ranging from Amazon Wishlists to Zooomr photos to more common feeds like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Sean Ammirati interviewed the founders of FriendFeed at ReadWriteTalk in February (podcast+transcript). Tech blogger Louis Gray has taken the lead in covering FriendFeed and related services. See also satire site

SocialThing! is the new kid on the (new) block and still in private beta. It currently supports just six services (Twitter, Pownce, Flickr, Facebook, Livejournal and Vimeo), but looks considerably prettier than FriendFeed - in case that matters to anyone. I had a chance to speak to the SocialThing! developers at SXSW and they assured me that everything was in place for new services to start becoming available quickly.

Key Differences

FriendFeed has a bit of a head start, but even barring that, there are more intuitive features in place despite its visual shortcomings. The most notable is that it links you to your friends' content even if you don't have access to a particular service. The reason is that when you friend someone on FriendFeed, that person has generated an actual account on the service, so they've elected to port in all of their desired feeds. So my friends can read my Ma.gnolia links even if they're a Del.icio.us users and vice versa. It's in this feature that its real power lies.

The reason SocialThing! will face pitfalls is that it's really just an RSS aggregator and as such, it doesn't do anything that you couldn't just do with your regular aggregator. Because FriendFeed creates a new network, it can do a variety of entirely new tasks, like suggesting new friends, a feature that I've found to be remarkably accurate in predicting individuals whom I'd actually be interested in. Additionally, FriendFeed adds functions such as inline commenting and "like" (thumbs up for a particular item) that add to the social experience.

Why FriendFeed is Better

Social media will continue to escalate for the foreseeable future, but it will become increasingly unlikely that you'll have accounts for every service out there. With FriendFeed, you don't have to, because of its network of networks, you can just coast along with the few accounts you're comfortable with, but still have access to friendly content across the board. This is the true innovation and it's the reason users will adopt FriendFeed over an RSS wrapper like SocialThing!

These are just the two most prominent of many lifestreaming services that have launched recently. See the ReadWriteWeb primer on lifestreaming from January and our list of 35 lifestreaming apps from last month. While Facebook's newsfeed has been copied by almost every other social network online, other innovators and entrepreneurs are aiming to offer more powerful versions of the same idea in standalone, cross-application lifestreaming services.

It probably seems like a thin difference, but within the social content platform lies an elegant concept. The site delivers a platform upon which any sort of content vehicle can be built.

Out of the box options include sites for restaurant reviews, photo and map mashups and video archives among others, but the real service is in the box labeled "Create a BricaBox from Scratch."

Using the homebrew option, users can utilize BricaBox components called "blocks" to build entirely new sites with completely diverse functions all inside the site's framework. One prominent example was the Silicon Alley 100: Peoples' Choice awards of the area's most influential figures. As this video illustrates (literally), the scope of content possibilities is wide:

The beauty of the project revolves around its outward simplicity. Creating a framework that supports so many variables took some failed experiments in other Web languages, before being rewritten in PHP. According to co-founder and CTO Kyle Bragger, BricaBox was initially built with Ruby on Rails, but scalability proved impossible due to the technical complexity of the service. But therein lies the elegance.

Despite the complex actions happening under the hood, users need not know anything about Ruby or PHP or anything difficult for that matter, they need simply to have an idea and initiative. Co-founder and CEO Nate Westheimer sees the the service as a fundamental evolution in Web publishing. "Think about what Blogger was before people knew about blogs," says Westheimer. "The Web has progressed since then. Now we have a more connected Internet -- both in terms of data and socializing. The time has come for a publishing platform with both elements. BricaBox is a simple way to mix and mash the tools needed to create unique, social content websites." Westheimer claims that "no one else does that."

Whether or not the Web will embrace his concept remains to be seen, but BricaBox appears to have created something unique. As the above image shows, it's not Ning and it's not Wordpress. Tell us in the comments if you know of a similar service.