With this new Timestamp update, along with everything Timeline-related, Facebook is hoping you will share more on its platform. We're edging closer and closer toward real-live lifestreaming. Timestamping new posts with an old date not only brings you closer to your Facebook past, it also encourages you to differentiate less between your offline and online lives. Timeline urges you to share more personal content, and make that content more social than it was on your old Facebook profile. Like everything Timeline-related, this update is only available to those who have used the Facebook Developer Timeline workaround. See the Timestamp update after the jump.

Click on the clock icon and you can input a year, month and date. Once you publish the status update, Facebook will position the update on your Timeline profile accordingly.

You'll be able to easily differentiate between what actually happened on Facebook in the past, and what you've timestamped with a past date. Maybe you want to remind someone of what you were doing with them on a particular day in the past? Just tag that person, the date and location in a status update.

The actual Timeline rollout has been delayed from the expected September 22 launch date; it's expected to go live on Monday, November 7, 2011.

Facebook's new Timeline, currently in a limited developer release but set to be unveiled to its hundreds of millions of users any day now, is going to shake up the social networking landscape. It's going to bring lifestreaming - formally a geeky activity based around RSS feeds - to the mainstream. In my view, Timeline is the smartest and most significant thing Facebook has done since launching a developer platform in May 2007. I think it's that important.

So where did the inspiration for Timeline come from and why is it going to be such a big deal? We can see the future just by looking at two earlier lifestreaming products: FriendFeed and scrappy start Memolane.

Steve Jobs once famously said, quoting Picasso, that "good artists copy, great artists steal." Sure enough, as with most game-changing things on the Web, Timeline is not an original invention by Facebook. Although Timeline wasn't directly stolen from anyone, it was clearly influenced by FriendFeed and Memolane.

One of the strongest inspirations for Timeline came from within Facebook itself, in the form of a startup it acquired in August 2009: FriendFeed. Co-founded by Bret Taylor, who is now Facebook's Chief Technology Officer, FriendFeed was a social media aggregator that was much beloved by Web geeks.

FriendFeed was always far too geeky for mainstream users, however to his great credit Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spotted its potential. At the time Zuckerberg called FriendFeed "a simple and elegant service for people to share information." (emphasis ours) Well, two years later and it just so happens that sharing information is a key reason why Facebook is introducing Timeline.

Yes, Facebook's Timeline is ostensibly focused on an individual's personal history - kind of like an online diary. But that's really just a front for the real purpose of Timeline: to expose your entire content history to your friends and public subscribers.

It's not just the sharing that's key, it's making that content more social. ReadWriteWeb did one of the earliest interviews with FriendFeed's founders, Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit, in February 2008. Something that Buchheit (who in the past had created Gmail for Google) said back then is more relevant than ever today, with Facebook's Timeline. Buchheit said that FriendFeed was "trying to go beyond simply aggregating to actually creating a pleasant social experience around the content." (emphasis ours)

So that's key point number 2 about Timeline: Facebook expects to make that content more social. That goal is supported by other Facebook initiatives this year, such as the real-time updates ticker and automated sharing from apps like Spotify and Washington Post.

Let's move now to a startup that wasn't acquired by Facebook, but which earlier this year launched a timeline service that is very close to what Facebook introduced later in the year. That startup's name is Memolane and we gave it a favorable review in January.

After Facebook announced its Timeline, Memolane CEO Eric Lagier tried to differentiate his service as a "Timeline of Your Life (more than just your Facebook posts)." Regardless of how Memolane is different from Facebook Timeline, he hit the nail on the head with his point that "time is the perfect tool to organize social media."

That's key point number 3 about Facebook Timeline: it organizes a lot of your social media activity, at least that which occurs on Facebook or on its third party partners like Spotify.

Incidentally, you have to feel for Memolane. An 800-pound gorilla just sat squarely on its little niche of the Web. Memoland is rather ominously "down for maintenance" as I write this, although its Twitter account reassures us that it is "preparing for some exciting things coming your way" this Tuesday. Here's hoping Memolane innovates itself into an exciting new direction with the timeline concept, because of course we love scrappy startups here at RWW.

Lifestreaming is Going Mainstream

There were many other products that Facebook probably took inspiration from for Timeline. Nokia Lifeblog and Six Apart's Vox are two that come to mind (to see how times have changed, read our mid-2006 analysis comparing Vox with Facebook). But the key points are clear from FriendFeed and Memolane:

1. Timeline is all about sharing personal content.
2. Timeline is also about making that personal content much more social than it is on your old Facebook profiles.
3. That's because a timeline is a highly effective way to organize social media content (making it easier to like, comment on and re-share).

The over-riding lesson from Facebook Timeline is that lifestreaming is going mainstream. At the beginning of this year, digital design consultancy Fjord predicted this would happen: "in 2011 we will see increasing numbers of people uploading aspects of their life to the cloud. They'll be able to combine this across multiple online services, generating meaning from data already online."

Of course Fjord wasn't to know that Facebook would implement Timeline and effectively position itself as the center of a huge trend. Which is what Facebook Timeline has done and why Facebook - and lifestreaming - is going to be very big.

Clicking the "Like" button is incredibly easy to do, and increasingly becoming the primary way people interact on Facebook.

Users are engaging with Facebook pages 31% more over the last year. Of this boost in engagement, 84% turned out to be from the "Like" button, while 15% were from comments and only 1% were from shares, according to a recent report from Efficient Frontier. Take a look at a chart from their report after the jump.

Use of the "Like" button requires little thought or effort from a Facebook user. "Liking" something is an impulsive reaction to easily parsable content. Commenting requires slightly more effort - and sharing takes even more. So while engagement is technically up, the type of engagement - "liking" - is not nearly as meaningful as it could be. Why isn't Facebook working to get its users to engage more meaningfully?

Prepare to Continue "Liking" Content on Facebook

As Facebook continues growing, that doesn't seem like a route it will be taking. This is evidenced by its shift in sharing over the past year.

In February, the Facebook "Like" button began replacing the "Share" button's functionality. "Like" starting acting like "Share." The new Facebook trend of "likes-as-shares" makes sense in the context of Spotify's frictionless integration, and the same goes for "reading" in Facebook social apps. And just think - the "Like" button is little more than a year-and-a-half old. A lot can happen in a year.

Is this part of a trend toward lifestreaming on Facebook? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

The University of Maryland police department is testing an app that will allow police to monitor live video of an emergency situation and will allow a mobile user to beam video to the police station in a time of need.

The app can also be used as a way to escort students from a library or a late night party to their dorm rooms.

Called M-ergency, the app rolled out in beta earlier this month and is being tested by 100 students. When the app is ready to go live, it will be offered to all students at the university.

All it takes is the push of a button on an Android phone. As soon as it is activated, live video streams right into a police station and operators, as well as police officers, can see what is happening instantaneously. The department plans on releasing an app for iPhones soon.

This should placate worried parents, who might fret over their sons or daughters being out late at night. Large college campuses with independent police forces could rely on this app in less-than-ideal sections of campus, or, on city campuses, anywhere in the city that their students travel.

This is a move quite different from recent citizen recordings of police action that have caused aggravation in certain legal circles. Illinois recently banned citizens from using recording devices during arrests.

In July, Rochester Police arrested a woman on her front lawn. Her crime? She was filming them during a traffic stop.

OpenCourt is a project by WBUR, the Boston University affiliate of National Public Radio, funded by the Knight Foundation to increase knowledge and interaction of the legal process by placing a streaming cameras in courtrooms. A couple of MacBooks Pros, a Canon HD camcorder and Livestream and you have your very own reality television.

This may sound fairly simple. Put a camera in a courtroom, press play and stream it to the Web. Technically speaking, it is not that much more than that. But there is a lot more to it than just having producing a live stream. The rules of engagement in courts are never straightforward. Local courts around the country tend not to have big signs around the room saying "you cannot tweet, stream live video or chew gum." Video is allowed (but can be limited by judges) in Massachusetts' courts, where the OpenCourt pilot program is taking place in Quincy District Court. That is not always the case around the country but the founders of OpenCourt hope to make the process more commonly accepted.

"It's a pilot," said John Davidow to Justin Ellis of the Nieman Journalism Lab. "It's now a reality and off the white board. More and more issues will come forward."

It is more than the equivalent of traffic camera in a courtroom though. Judges have access to the stream from their benches and certain topics, like restraining orders, will not be lived streamed.

The use case is straightforward. Educate the community in the court process, keep people informed of what is happening in their area, increase awareness of how courts work and provide an open and transparent look into the machinations of an important government entity.

It could also be used as a tool for journalists. It was designed by journalists (WBUR is associated with the College of Communications at BU) and the Knight Foundation is a non-profit group with the aim of advancing journalism in the digital era. Live streaming cameras in local courtrooms can help newsrooms stretched thin of reporters. For instance, the Quincy Patriot-Ledger embedded an OpenCourt stream in an article the day after the service launched.

"I'd argue that nothing compares to actually being there and seeing with your own eyes," Davidow said to Ellis. "At the same time, maybe some news organizations would find efficiency in that setup."

Although sudoSocial would be suitable for curating any stream of content, explains the introductory blog post, in its early, still rather sparse format, it's better for personal homepages that aggregate your various feeds, like Flickr photos and blog posts, for example.

Hacking a Homepage with sudoSocial

To create your own personal homepage using sudoSocial, you'll need to have an OpenID account and, the page reminds you, that's probably something you already have - even if you didn't know it. A link to OpenID's "Get an OpenID" page displays a collection of OpenID enabled services like Google, Yahoo, Blogger, flickr, MySpace, WordPress, AOL and others. For our own testing purposes, we used a Google Profile URL. Yours can be found here: http://google.com/profiles/me.

After signing in and filling out a little profile info (if it's the first time you've used an OpenID), you're taken to the Stream Editor where you can begin to add sources. Any URL, Atom or RSS feed is supported.

In the next tab, you can edit the design using CSS, JavaScript and Processing.js. (Oh, yes, did we forget to mention this tool isn't for the mainstream user?)

When you've finished your configurations, you could end up with a webpage that looks something like this: http://sudosocial.me/u/pattyokdemo, if you choose a more basic setup, or like this: http://ozten.com/homepage-demo.html if you design something a bit more advanced.

If you're interested, you can also contribute to the project by hacking the source code, found here: http://github.com/ozten/sudosocial.

A Better Option for Everyday Users: Flavors.me

However, if you were hoping that sudoSocial would provide a simple way to quickly set up a personal homepage, you're going to walk away feeling disappointed. A better option for that purpose, or really any stream aggregation of your choosing, is Flavors.me.

This lovely, user-friendly web service lets you customize everything design-wise, including typefaces, layouts and color schemes while also aggregating the feeds of your choice. And for most of the supported services (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, flickr, etc.), you don't even need to know the RSS's feed URL - you simply click "add service" and authorize the app.

That said, sudoSocial isn't designed with the mainstream user in mind. It's intended as a more advanced platform for designers and developers who know what they want and how to make it happen via code. For them, sudoSocial may be a good starting point, but it still needs quite a bit of polish and bug-quashing before it's fully ready for a wider audience.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2010/06/02/mozilla_launches_sudosocial_an_experimental_lifestream_platform http://readwrite.com/2010/06/02/mozilla_launches_sudosocial_an_experimental_lifestream_platform Lifestreaming Wed, 02 Jun 2010 00:04:06 -0700 Sarah Perez Maybe we're getting to be a bit of a broken record on this point, but a blog post this morning by Robert Scoble on how malleable social graphs could change the direction of location based services reminded us of the fine line we think we're all walking.

Malleable social graphs, much like recommendation engines and customized searches, sound like the wave of the future, but we fear that they will, if improperly used, ensure that we never hear a disagreeable opinion or see something outside of our day-to-day ever again.

Scoble's Argument: LBS Dead In The Water Without Innovation

Some of his suggestions and criticisms are right on point, such as the opportunity Gowalla has to point someone checking in at a car wash to anything but a lamp store. Checking into the TV show "24" and chatting with other fans sounds like a great idea that Miso is on top of already, just as SuperGlued has taken center stage for aligning like-minded folks around live music events.

...And Then It All Goes Wrong

Just as we argued when we found that Google was customizing one in five searches, all of this recommending, customizing and filtering, can put us into an idea echo chamber of sorts, where we only come across safe and previously approved, by our actions, opinions. But a part of what we like so much about Facebook is getting into debates with friends we might never get into in "real life".

Go ahead and post a video of the Tea Baggers on your profile, say how absurd you think it is or how much you support it, and see what unexpected discussion ensues.

It may not end up being pretty, but maybe you'll learn something - if everyone can keep it polite enough to actually exchange ideas and information. Unless we truly believe that one side is always right and another always wrong (a ridiculous proposition) then filtering out any content we may not agree with is sure to create even more people who believe they are absolutely right. After all, everything they read on the Internet tells them so.

...Or Does It?

Here's what happens: Yuzu is a place that is awesome for advanced sushi lovers. I've eaten sushi all over the world in places like Tokyo, Yokohama, New York, London, and other places. I love advanced sushi. I look for restaurants who do sushi well. But most people aren't like me. Most people don't even like sushi. So, if they get dragged to a place like this they try to order "Americanized" sushi like, um, California rolls. Or fried crap I can't even pronounce. That is NOT sushi. Anyway, these people, er, newbies, get to Yuzu and find that all the other "non-sushi" stuff sucks. So they rate it low. Me? I could care less about all that other non-sushi stuff when I am looking for a sushi restaurant, which is why I rate this place five stars. Now, Yelp does NOT have a malleable social graph. We can't filter out all the "sushi newbies" who don't like sushi anyway.

Malleable social graphs, recommendation engines, customized searches and the like all have great uses and can be immensely powerful tools. We can find out about all sorts of things we might have missed because they would have otherwise been lost in the overwhelming stream of information. Using these sorts of tools in conjunction with LBS is where the industry needs to go, as Scoble argues, to stay afloat.

But once you return back to the ideological realm again, though, as with his argument about movie reviews, we feel that the stance gets a bit tenuous. Our fear, as we discussed when looking at recommendation engine My6Sense, is that people need to step outside these filters otherwise they will never see the unexpected and have their thoughts challenged.

And of course, this is not a black and white debate. It isn't between either having content recommended or having the entirety of the Internet's data blasted at you, full force. There are gradations and in-betweens, and maybe, sometimes, you just want to know what all of your friends are talking about. But even then, do you only want to know what your friends are talking about that you can be sure you agree with?

Different opinions, ideas, and their vigorous debate is essential to a free and developing society. On this point, we implore Facebook, Google, My6Sense, Twitter and everyone else - no matter how much our staunch Republican friends may annoy us, please don't silence them. We'll never get anywhere if you do.

One Last Thing

It was, in fact, the third story down in our Twitter Times, a website that creates a custom, newspaper-style page, specifically personalized by looking at all of the links being tweeted and retweeted by all of the people you follow on Twitter.

So much for personalization killing debate, eh?

According to the trio of developers behind the site (Barry Borsboom, Frank Groeneveld and Boy van Amstel), "the goal of this website is to raise some awareness of this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc." There are also ads on the site, so the developers clearly also had something else in mind when they started this site. No matter the developers' motivations, the visceral reaction to PleaseRobeMe on Twitter, shows that the developers have hit a nerve.

PleaseRobMe doesn't show anything new that a regular Twitter search for the 4sq.com domain wouldn't uncover, but it's the first time that a service has made this information so blatantly obvious. We don't think that a lot of thieves are actually trolling the Internet for information when people leave their homes, though we have already seen some burglaries where status updates may have played a role.

Besides robberies, there are also other reasons why you might want to keep your Foursquare profile private. Do you, after all, really want to tell your future employer that your spent all those weeknights at the local bar?

Privacy Concerns: The Limiting Factor for Location-Based Networks?

More importantly, though, this service highlights the privacy implications of regularly broadcasting your location. Some people are willing to take the risk and are perfectly fine with broadcasting their location and services like Foursquare reward these check-ins with virtual badges and real-world discounts for their most active users. For a lot of people, however, sharing location data takes online transparency one step too far.

Ultimately, the success of location-based networks will be limited if they can't find ways to make users feel safe when using these services.

How to Stay Safe?

If you really feel the need to share your location with the whole world, then you have to accept the risks. This isn't just limited to location-aware applications, though. Posting Twitter updates from your vacation also make it pretty obvious that you are not at home.

When it comes to location-aware services and geo-social networks, we prefer services that allow their users to send location updates privately to a select group of friends and trusted contacts. BrightKite - one of the older geo-social networks - for example, allows you to set very granular privacy controls on a per-post level. Of course, you could always resort to using a completely anonymous service like BlockChalk or a permission-based one-on-one service like EchoEcho, but with these, you can't update your friends about what bar to meet them at either and the social aspects of these services are limited.

It would also be nice if these services allowed users to select the level of granularity of their check-ins. While this won't discourage burglars (and doesn't work for FourSquare-like apps), being able to just point to "Houston, TX" as your location instead of the actual hotel your are staying in could alleviate the fears of a lot of users.

The Dangers of Mixing the Virtual and the Real World

PleaseRobMe points out the dangers of location-based social networks. Services like Foursquare, Brightkite and Google Buzz bridge the gap between the virtual world of social networks and the real world, which is something we are not accustomed, to. It's easy to think that the information we share online doesn't have any influence on the real world, but PleaseRobMe makes it pretty clear that there can be real-world consequences to sharing your location.

What Do You Do?

What is your policy for staying safe on location-aware social networks? Do you avoid them at all cost? Do you think that the positive aspects outweigh the potential risks? Do you use a pseudonym and a fake avatar? Let us know in the comments.

Social media aggregator Cliqset today announced a new beta version of its platform that aggregates activity feeds from 70 different social media sites, transforms them into normalized Activity Streams standard data and then pushes them out in real time.

The company's offers multiple ways to access the data through its API but also hopes that more users will stick with its own, now much improved, user interface. The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers to click this link will gain access to the new beta version of the site.

What does Cliqset offer that the Facebook-acquired FriendFeed doesn't? According to Cliqset: "We're much more standards compliant, we allow broader sharing, granular filters, a different permissions model, a much more open API and we have more services tied to ours (70 vs. FriendFeed's 50)."

The most important thing Cliqset is doing is probably transforming all these different update feeds into the standardized format called Activity Streams. That format is already being supported by Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live and Opera.

Michael Calore explains what Cliqset is doing with Activity Streams as follows:

A huge bonus is that Cliqset is using the emerging Activity Streams data specification to make all this happen. Activity Streams is an open-source XML-based format that uses a common actor-verb-asset model to report an activity on a social website. For example, "Amy shared a video" or "Mike rated this photo." It's a simple organizing principle that allows social web services to more easily talk to each other about what their users are doing.
But if not everyone is reporting their users' activity data using a common model, it becomes harder to get two services to talk to each other. And only a handful of sites are supporting Activity Streams right now.
As Cliqset co-founder Darren Bounds tells Webmonkey, Cliqset is actually re-writing all the aggregated data streams into the Activity Streams format, physically cleaning up the social web's mess as it goes.

Cliqset tells us that it's working on making a streaming API for this data available and let us in on some secret projects to bring real-time cross-platform data flowing to places around the web that it's not available today.

Right now you cannot easily pull Activity Streams feeds through Cliqset for people who have not signed up for the service themselves. It would be great if Cliqset began consuming the Webfinger protocol, for example and let me point at all my Google Contacts, discover their social media sites from around the web and then transform those into Activity Streams for consumption in other apps. That future isn't here and it may never be, but a web user can hope.

For now the company is using the long polling method and this newly normalized data to do some impressive things with its own user interface. Michael Calore goes into depth about that part of the project on Wired.com's WebMonkey blog. We'd like to recommend his post as our Real-Time Web Article of the Day, in fact. Check it out for a closer look at the innovative effort underway at Cliqset.

We're highlighting one article about the real-time web from off-site every day, leading up to the October 15th ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. Data normalization, Activity Streams, filtering and APIs are going to be big topics of conversation there. We hope you'll join us for those conversations.

At one time, FriendFeed clones like Lifestream.fm and Socialthing! looked like promising alternatives, but neither of them offered the same rich and innovative features that FriendFeed does - the very features which made FriendFeed the standout service that it is today. However, there is one service that may have an opportunity to capitalize on the FriendFeed exodus: social media aggregator Streamy.

Could Streamy be a Contender? Yes!

When we looked at Streamy back in March of this year, we were more than impressed with what it had to offer. For some reason though, the service's social networking aspects never really became heavily used by the early adopter crowd. Everyone had their own reasons for this decision of course, with complaints which ranged from the service feeling a little too raw for everyday use to its RSS reader which couldn't (and still doesn't) provide a viable alternative to Google Reader. However, we think the main reason for the lack of uptake has more to do with the fact that Streamy's core audience was already busy interacting, commenting, and "liking" items over on their social media aggregator of choice: FriendFeed.

Now, with FriendFeed out of the way (or soon to be, that is), it may be time for us to give Streamy another look. There are a number of features which should appeal to today's FriendFeed users if they decide to make the switch. However, there are still some issues with how Streamy implements these features, and we'll make note of those too.

1. FriendFeed Friend Import

When you sign up for Streamy, you have the option to find your friends on other services. One of those services is FriendFeed. By clicking on the "People" link at the top of the page then selecting "Find Friends" you can import your friends from Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Google, and even Flickr. This is at least as good as FriendFeed's own friend import process which only imported from email, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, it gives you the ability to easily re-create your FriendFeed social graph on Streamy without having to manually seek out your friends and re-add them.

What Streamy needs to work on: One thing Streamy needs to improve in this area is the ability to "select all" the friends it finds and let you follow them in one fell swoop. At the moment, you have to click "Follow" next to each individual who you want to add. It's also really hard to see who's following you and then reciprocate. Although new followers appear on the homepage in the "new from friends" section, you have to "remove" each person from this box after following them only to have more new followers appear in their place. And there's no way to tell whether or not you were already following these people, which leads to confusion. There should be a centralized way of managing this activity and the homepage widget definitely needs to sync with your following choices made on the backend.

2. Comment on Stories

On the Streamy homepage, a section called "Stories for You" delivers personalized news based on your site activity like stories you and your friends are sharing and commenting on. However, since at first Streamy has no activity to go on, it simply recommends "popular" stories to you and those may not be stories you actually enjoy. Like FriendFeed, you can comment on these stories and those comments will be seen by others reading the same story. Also like FriendFeed, undesirable stories can be hidden from your view with the "hide" button. However, unlike FriendFeed, Streamy actually introduces a great feature here: threaded comments. Each comment has a "reply" button next to it, letting users reply to each other's comments as opposed to simply creating a new one.

What Streamy needs to work on: Although FriendFeed's river of news was also personalized based on who you followed, the site offered a number of ways to surface popular content. When your friends commented on an item, it "bubbled up" to appear at the top of your stream, for instance. FriendFeed also had a "best of day" feature which displayed the most active stories that day. Streamy doesn't have anything like this so content with comments could easily become lost. For now, the best way to see stories your friends comment on is in the "New from People" homepage widget (also available in the "People" section) which is an activity feed of your friends' comments among other things.

3. Groups: Streamy's Version of FriendFeed Rooms

Streamy has a feature which lets you create groups which is somewhat reminiscent of FriendFeed's Rooms feature. As with Rooms, groups can be topic-based so you and your friends can discuss the news. You can browse through your own group memberships to see which groups you're a member of and you can access the admin features for the groups you own. Also like FriendFeed, groups can be public or private as you choose and you can invite members simply by typing their name.

What Streamy needs to work on: Unlike FriendFeed, groups can't be auto-populated with content like RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, YouTube videos, etc. Everything needs to be manually entered through a text box or shared with the group via Streamy's sharing features. However, sharing items from your subscriptions or recommended stories is more difficult than it should be. Despite Streamy's cool drag-and-drop interface for posting to external services, sharing with groups or individuals still leaves a lot to be desired.

When you first grab an item to share it, icons appear letting you save it (the star icon), share to other services like Facebook or Twitter (green arrow), or share with a friend (people icon). When you select the share with friends option, though, only a limited number of people appear and they're only identified with their avatar, not by name. Also missing is a way to share with the groups from here.

Instead, to share with a group, you have to click on the story's headline then access the share button from the top right of the article. Once here, it's very easy to share with either people, groups, or services. It's the sort of option that should be available directly from the homepage without any extra clicks.

4. Your Shared Stuff

Another sharing feature in Streamy is the one where you're able to share items by posting them to your profile. This feature is activated through the drag-and-drop interface and dragging the content to the Streamy service from the available list of services to post to (green arrow icon, once again). This posts the story to your profile which your friends can then see when they click on "Shared Stuff" from their own Streamy homepage. It also appears in the "New from People" homepage feed. In a way, this is a lot like FriendFeed's home feed which is comprised of all the shared items from your FriendFeed friends.

What Streamy needs to work on: Unlike FriendFeed, your own "Shared Stuff" isn't populated with the dozens of social media services that FriendFeed supports. Instead, Streamy displays all your site activity, including friends you added and groups you created or joined. Your friends will then see your Streamy status updates, shared stories, and stories you commented on mixed in with these other activities in their "New from People" feed. We're not sure that we want to see people's site-wide activity (like who they just friended) - we're more interested in the actual content they're sharing.

5. ...And So Much More!

What Streamy really has going for it, though, is what FriendFeed didn't - the dashboard aggregator, integration with other social media services, and built in chat. Streamy's layout is a lot different from FriendFeed - or from Twitter for that matter - and that may be good thing in some people's opinion. As opposed to a real-time "river of news" the site's homepage is a widget-filled dashboard with updates from your feeds, Facebook, and any other services you add. It also includes a friend list showing your IM buddies from Google Chat, AIM, or MSN. The Status update box lets you post to Facebook, Twitter, Streamy, or (for now) FriendFeed. As you delve into the dashboards for the other services using the small buttons at the top, you'll be surprised to find things like a full-on Twitter client complete with replies, DMs, and trending topics, for example. Digg's dashboard is a nice, consolidated view of what's hot on that service... and so on.

If you don't like the dashboard, you can also choose to have Streamy load up directly to your feeds or one of the other social media services Streamy supports.

What Streamy needs to work on: Adding widgets to the dashboard needs improvement. You have to first click on the widget (+) button from the top of the page to select the additional widgets. While simple enough in theory, there were some bugs when testing this out. For example, adding a Digg widget for the topic "Technology" was a dead-end. After you get the drop-down box to select a topic, there's no "go" or "add" button to actually complete the process.

Conclusion

In the end, Streamy shows a lot of potential for becoming a great service and they could certainly capitalize on FriendFeed's impending shutdown if they so desired. However, there's still a bit of work to be done to make the service as usable as it needs to be for ex-FriendFeed users. In Streamy's defense, however, they originally never had the goal of competing with FriendFeed which is why things are the way they are. Like us, they never imagined FriendFeed would be acquired and shut down. Now that it has sold, though, the company is interested in seeing how they could appeal to the community of early adopters who originally made FriendFeed their home.

Will Streamy be able to make the necessary changes in time before someone else lures the ex-FriendFeeders over to their service? Perhaps. The company, currently a small 3-person team, has made amazing strides so far and is currently looking into getting additional funding. In the next couple of months, if things go well, we may see a lot of changes happen very quickly - specifically to the social networking aspects of the service. The company also sees a lot of potential to incorporate new features which aren't simply FriendFeed dupes. Hopefully, we'll be able to update this post someday soon with details as to what those may be.

Locational privacy refers to the expectation that as regular citizens our whereabouts are not being monitored. We've all heard of the horror stories about illegal wiretapping and citizen surveillance, but what about the services we opt into? According to the report "On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever", it's fairly easy to use cryptographic techniques to ensure your anonymity. Rather than revealing a mobile device's owner to service providers, one way to ensure anonymity is for a mobile device to ping services using a cryptographic proof-of-identity. A University of Waterloo report entitled, "Louis, Lester and Pierre: Three Protocols for Location Privacy" provides a deeper look at identity masking techniques.

This is an important subject for those companies looking to enter into the geo-locational space. Groups that encrypt their data are taking pains to reduce the threat of identity theft, illegal surveillance or for data to be subpoenaed by a court. These companies will be rewarded with customer loyalty when the unfortunate time comes for one or all three of the above scenarios.

Those critical of encryption might suggest that law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide, but that simply isn't true. What if you're in alcoholics anonymous? Or you've simply spent the night at a person's house? And honestly, do you really want your running club to see how often you eat at Arby's? Encryption allows us to ping our friends while maintaining an air of mystique, and at the end of the day, the companies that care about their customers, keep them.

But none of them are as drop-dead good-looking - or as customizable - as AmpliFeeder, a free, open-source distributed social activity aggregator. The only major drawback: It's the kind of web app that needs to be installed on a server. But a hosted version is in the works, and the screen shots prove it's so worth the effort.

AmpliFeeder aggregates items from Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Google Shared Items, Tumblr, Digg, Reddit, LastFM, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Upcoming, Mixx, BrightKite, and more. It can also handle any RSS feeds you throw at it.

Perhaps best of all, it'll automagically import any of the services you link to through FriendFeed, making your new site setup time about 30 seconds:

Creator Jon Paul Davies has uploaded several other interesting and useful videos on using AmpliFeeder.

Certainly, the best features of the product for the end user are its slew of gorgeous interfaces. The themes differ not just in color/fonts/ridiculous design doodads; they mix up the information design itself.

For example, if the user prefers straight-up streams of data, there are several sexy options such as this:

For those who like their data with a little more segregation between services, there are themes such as these:

And then, a couple themes go all-out on the visualization:

Best of all, there's a custom CSS function that graphic designer-type users can use to style themes to their hearts' content.

Anyone can comment on posted content as comments "live" on the AmpliFeeder site. Items can be hidden or deleted. On the back end, a graph report shows what percentage of content comes from which services. AmpliFeeder also has its own microblog function; posts appear on the AmpliFeeder page and are pushed to the linked services. And AmpliFeeder can also generate a nice, data-portable XML file for users to backup all their social stream's data; XML files can also be used to restore data.

Burton Group analyst Mike Gotta wrote back in the mists of time (May 2007), "The term [lifestream] actually goes back to at least 1997, when Eric Freeman and David Gelernter saw it "as a network-centric replacement for the desktop metaphor. As their project page (last updated in 2000) at Yale put it: 'A lifestream is a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream.'"

Since then, lifestreaming has become the must-have method for communicating with one's public. Look at Modernista; look at Skittles. Better yet, look at what independent designers and other creatives are doing with the medium. And all this time, aside from complicated and costly proprietary solutions, most lifestreaming sites have displayed unbearably ugly UIs.

Kudos to Davies for making a functional lifestream aggregator that looks like a real website. In fact, we imagine that since the current state of the web has given rise to more and more personal and enterprise/corporate sites of the lifestreaming persuasion, Davies' creation comes at a perfect time for designers and webmasters alike.

UPDATE: For our super-smart commenters, here's what we wrote last year about Sweetcron. Yup, I'm new here.

I had been pitched on this interdisciplinary tech/creative conference in the middle of nowhere and decided to go out of perverse curiosity - because really, who in their right mind would have a conference in Nebraska? I had to find out. My good friend and FreedomSpeaks.com co-founder Kurt Daradics' curiosity got the best of him, as well; and when I told him I planned to drive, he booked a plane not to Omaha, but to D.C., so we could make the journey together. That was the start of the "road trip gone Twitter."

We laid out a plan to visit ten cities for ten social media meetups and tweet, blog, live stream, video blog, and photograph almost every waking moment of the trip. With advice from Duke Stump (of North Star Manifesto renown), we carefully crafted our goals and intentions, you know, to give it a slightly less reckless air. We involved a Wordpress developer and tech scene photographer, Jonathan Dingman, in our escapade. About two weeks after it occurred to us to go to Omaha in the first place, we had a website up and running, we had sponsors contributing funds and product, and we had already set off on a 3,000-mile journey across the Midwest.

Video features @JolieODell and @Dingman, camera work by @KurtyD.

I'm writing this now from the backseat of a moving car. We're rolling over the irrigated fields of Iowa about 30 minutes away from BIGOmaha and Gary Vaynerchuk's opening night party; we're getting calls from our metropolitan social media friends already there and excitedly sharing stories we've gathered so far. We tell them about the young St. Louis farmer whose local produce co-op was at capacity with a full waiting list, the tech scenesters still on fire from their town's first BarCamp or Startup Weekend, the fresh perspectives on the purposes and future of tech, the deliberate and intentional movements to live and buy locally, the strong online connections within physical communities (it's not just the geeks on Twitter out here; it's the waitresses, the baristas, the small business owners, and just about everybody else), and the focus on sustainability in the most pristine corners of our country.

We've seen communities full of optimism and energy and shockingly hip millennial folks, and we've been shown amazing hospitality by complete strangers. I credit this partly to traditional Midwestern kindness and partly to the radically cool nature of the Internet. You see, another big premise of the RoadTwip is that the online and offline each have the most powerful effects when combined. Relationships are strengthened; the social web grows thicker; value is enhanced.

@Dingman and @Giramonda at Arthur Bryant's Barbecue in Kansas City.

One of my favorite stories so far is about Kansas City, which wasn't even a planned stop on the RoadTwip. A few KC locals got wind of the 'Twip and reached out to me on Brightkite; their enthusiasm was so infectious that I ended up begging KurtyD and Dingman to allow for a drive-by meetup for the city's famous barbecue and a look at what residents were telling me was a tradition of microentrpreneurism. We had an amazing time there, ended up staying a couple hours longer than we should have, and are consequently late for Gary V's shindig. But we learned so much from the new friends we made that not one of us regrets a second of it. This, to me, is a perfect illustration of the value of social media. Next time anyone asks me why I waste my time on the Internet, this story is going to make an appearance.

The three of us have mapped out an arc through a lot of open space dotted with relatively small towns in order to hear new stories, challenge our perspectives, stop spinning on the NYC/SF/LA axis of the tech world, get outside the echo chamber, test the IRL capabilities of social media, and get a glimpse of something new and authentic.

@ax0n explains the madness and method behind his blog, KC-Bike.Blogspot.com.

So many young people will never have the extraordinary privilege of visiting the American Midwest.

Perhaps this is due to misconceptions about its nature, population, and culture. Perhaps it's because opportunities are perceived to be greater in more urban areas. Perhaps it's a simple lack of curiosity. Watching the youngest of my cohorts as he drives our packed-to-the-gills car through Missouri rain, exclaiming at the way the cars ahead fade into the bend of the road, I can't help but pity those who will never see this place or meet the many wonderful people who live here and love it.

To read about the rest of the journey, bookmark the RoadTwip blog or follow us on Twitter. The RoadTwip gang is @JolieODell, @KurtyD, and @Dingman.

@KurtyD putting the finishing touches on a RoadTwip video.

Even the app's developer agrees that the app crossed the line, overstepping Facebook's much celebrated privacy controls. We're still disappointed though, and we wish that this rich source of data could be opened up for developers and users to build value on top of. What kind of publishing system doesn't offer an RSS feed? A fundamentally closed one.

There's something mind boggling about the fact that Facebook opened up user news feeds through the Activity Streams Atom protocol, thus allowing other applications to access and work with all that data, but explicitly prohibits the same information from being served up to users themselves as an RSS feed. So a software developer can access your news feed as a data stream, but you can't.

The argument is that the News Feed RSS made it too easy to violate privacy conditions put on some users' Facebook data.

Facebook hasn't responded yet to our request for an official comment, but Facebook software engineer, Ari Steinberg, explained in an unofficial comment on the Activity Streams discussion group, "We're certainly not opposed to enabling you to export your own content (in fact, we're always trying to work on ways to make that easier), but exporting all your friends' content to a totally public place without their permission isn't cool."

But it was really useful. Sometimes privacy is at odds with innovation, and while we would never want to say that privacy is illegitimate - we're not happy to see it shut down major potential avenues for innovation either.

If the app published an authenticated feed (meaning you had to log in to view it) and if the apps around the web had better support for authenticated feeds, then the story would probably be different. That's not where we're at, though; even the very popular Google Reader can't handle password protected RSS feeds.

App developer, Teck Chia, says privacy issues and copyright violation in the use of the phrase "News Feed" were both cited by Facebook when the app was shut down. Chia understands the privacy concern but hopes to be able to find a solution shortly. One option may be to publish only a user's own items in a feed, perhaps folding in the updates of friends who have added the app as well and specifically opted-in, and perhaps sending items through the feed that say merely that "Your friend John updated his staus, click here to log in to Facebook and read it."

We're not sure how useful those options sound. It's not surprising but it is a real disappointment that Facebook shut the app down. The wall that keeps Facebook user data in and private by default feels too contrary to the fundamental nature of the internet for it to last. In a poll we performed last week, 40% of our readers said they wanted Facebook to open their data either a little or a lot. We're sure the percentage of all Facebook users who feel that way would be smaller, but a closed pocket of the web seems to us to be something that will be worn away in time.

There may not be an RSS feed for your Facebook News Feed today, but it sure seems like only a matter of time until there is.

Integration With 20 New Services - MySpace Coming Soon

Windows Live users will also soon be able to aggregate updates from MySpace, though according to Microsoft, this integration is still a few months off.

Just like before, your friends will be able to see your updates from these services on their Windows Live home pages, though your friends can also opt-out of your updates, or updates from select services. If you are a prolific digger, for example, your friends can choose not to see an update for every single story you dugg.

If you have a Windows Live account, this link will take you to a page with all the new web activities you can now import. As usual, Microsoft is rolling these updates out slowly, so your account may not feature these new services just yet.

Functionally, the biggest update to Windows Live is that users can now easily invite friends on other social networks into their Windows Live network (and vice versa).

Web IM for Hotmail

In addition, Microsoft also released Web IM for Hotmail today in a number of countries, including the U.S., Canada, Germany, and Brazil.

Looks Like This Strategy is Working for Windows Live

In many ways, this update makes Windows Live into even more of a mainstream version of the current non-beta, non-real-time version of FriendFeed. You can easily aggregate most of your online activity and your friends can easily follow all of your updates on their Windows Live accounts.

According to both Compete and Quantcast, Windows Live has seen its traffic grow rapidly since it updated its services last November, and the addition of these new web activities will surely not hurt the site's traffic.

If you read Douglas Bowman's reasons for leaving Google recently, you may have an idea about the difference between a data-driven and a design-driven approach. The former focuses primarily on making information (or data) more organized, manageable, and available. All noble goals, but the resulting interface may be lacking in those things that humans find elegant, practical or perhaps even visually appealing. To most people, the difference may be trifling: If something works, it doesn't necessarily have to look pretty. But high design has appeal too, it has historically been tied to high value and luxury. The differences are easy to spot if you know where to look; for example, compare a Bang & Olufsen CD player to a Sony mini component system. The B&O system stands out (both visually and in price) due to the simple application of design. Luxury cars and expensive office buildings also benefit from design studies.

Let's get back to Skimmer, now with our eyes open to the design side. We can mention that it's not extremely fast, that it lacks the ability to re-tweet, that the icons are small and somewhat mysterious, and that (in some modes) it takes up a large amount of screen real-estate. But those qualms are almost beside the point when you consider that it is presenting information from multiple sources in a way that has never been realized before. In fact, I am guessing the designers were going for the word unprecedented. The tile-based layout, the unique font that is both modern and legible, the smooth updates from one mode to another all belie a careful attention to detail that is all too often lacking on other tools in their haste to support everything under the sun.

We mentioned that Fallon is releasing Skimmer along with a broader image push, and you can see this on their site.  Each page carries over the same tile-based concept, cross-fading slideshow effects and generous space given to text areas. You might think all this design work is a waste of time, but think about the last time you saw the 'future crime' interface in Minority Report. You were impressed, right? I can guarantee you, that interface was not conceived as data-driven. It's pure, unadulterated design work.

StoryTlr is a strong contender in a field full of aggressive lifestream aggregators. On the surface, it may resemble services like Profilactic or chi.mp, but taking a look under the hood exposes broader influences, such as sidebar widgets (similar to WordPress), comment support (like FriendFeed) and Tumblr-style pre-made and custom themes too! And we should probably mention that the Pages feature isn't a completely new idea - we first saw something very similar (called stories) on new startup Pelago's site Whrrl.

We spent entirely too much time creating our own StoryTlr site (which you can see here) and, while the back-end is more traditional and lacking slick JavaScript-style drag-and-drop features, the UI is very solid and access to customization easy and rewarding. Both what shows up on any of the tabs you create and the overall site look and feel can be tweaked. And if you already have a blog and just want to add a lifestream page, they have you covered there as well with a number of free widgets you can use.

Finally, you can in fact use StoryTlr as your blog too. Although the blog tools are not as robust as, say, WordPress, StoryTlr supports short-form and long-form entries with attached pictures and other media. It supports creating a tab that links to a non-RSS-based standard web page as well. So you can actually prioritize the lifestream over the blog, which may be a plus if you are setting up a vanity domain where you want to make a priority of showing activity over blog posts.

One Photo per Day

As you would expect, you can upload your photos directly to the service, or you can send them to a personalized momentile email address. Whenever you upload a new photo, you can add a short message that will then be sent out to your followers (momentile calls them 'stalkers') by SMS, Twitter, or email. However, momentile stresses that this is only meant to inform your followers about a new photo upload and should not be confused with tagging or adding a caption to a photo. Indeed, you can't add captions to a photo yourself - only your followers can add these.

You can upload more than one picture per day, by the way, but momentile enforces its one-picture-per-day rule and will automatically discard the older picture. Every day, you have until midnight to update your picture. That constraint, of course, is the focus of the service and it does make you think twice about which picture you want to choose to represent a given day.

Not a Social Network

Momentile insists that it is not a social network, but it does have a number of social features like following other users or saving other users' photos in your own 'stash.'

365

In a way, momentile codifies the 365 meme that is pretty popular on Flickr right now into one coherent app, with a focus on the mobile aspects of sharing and taking these pictures.

Overall, momentile looks like a fun and interesting app. It does have some minor usability problems, but the core idea behind the service is pretty cool. A few weeks ago, the cool kid on the blog was Plinky, a web app that asked you a different question every day. In some ways, momentile is a logical extension of that idea and it will be interesting to see how momentile's users decide to utilize the service in the long run.

Invites

Momentile is still in private alpha testing, but we have ten invites to give away for now - just send an email to 'momentile AT frederic.otherinbox.com' and we will get one to you ASAP.

The app works on both the original 1G iPhone and the 3G iPhone, and is available in the iPhone App Store for $1.99

Pingle Features

• Simple, comfortable user interface
• Camera and photo library integration
• All features supported in portrait or landscape orientation (for wide keyboard fans)
• View and repost from a history of your previous pings
• Easy location integration with location privacy controls ("fuzzing")
• Google Maps based viewer to see and modify your posted location

Pingle Limitations

As Zee points out on the The Next Web, the only problem with Pingle is if you're in an area that has no reception, there is no way to save an update for posting until you do get reception.

"I'm likely stick to using Mail until Pingle integrate one feature "Outbox". Using Mail, should I not have access to the web, the app will automatically save any emails (updates) in the outbox until there's sufficient a connection for the email to be sent."

Perhaps that will be in the next version. Until then, if you give it a try, let us know what you think.

Here are our favorite examples of some of the searches we've already found quite valuable.

The New Search Options

As you can see from the screen below, the new FriendFeed Advanced Search options are quite granular. You can limit your search to particular sites like Facebook, Amazon or any of 50 other sites supported for import. You can search your network of friends or the site at large. You can set a popularity threshold by number of comments or "likes." There are lots of options. All searches have RSS feeds for their results.

Brand Monitoring

For most people, tracking conversations around a brand name will probably be the most useful function of the new FriendFeed search. We find that relatively boring, so we'll get it out of the way first.

Mentions of "Sun Microsystems," system wide, with 3 or more comments.

Obviously FriendFeed is quite small right now so this isn't a comprehensive web-wide conversation tracker, but these search results could help point to issues that are catching part of the public's imagination enough to discuss. There are less than 1 million people using FriendFeed so far.

There are other searches that can provide more tangible value right now, even without a large number of people yet using the service.

Well Placed People

Location declarations through Brightkite, from friends of Creative Commons Foundation CEO Joi Ito, where 3 or more people "liked" the location statement or description. Chris Messina excluded, in order to see more of other people.

Your Wittiest Friends

Comments by my friends, tracked by Backtype, with 3 or more "likes." I've subscribed to this feed as there are some important details here that I wouldn't have wanted to miss. If you haven't signed up for BackType, or haven't tied it to your FriendFeed account yet, you should. It's easy to do.

Hot and Topical

FriendFeed rooms are a place to discuss a wide variety of topics. Here's some of the most commented on items in the Green Tech room. Find someone who made a great comment here? You can also search for all the rest of their comments.

The Hottest Events

What events are the cool kids going to, that their friends think are particularly cool? Here's events that friends of crafty inventor Bre Petis have said they are going to on Upcoming.org and that their friends have "liked." Robert Scoble excluded for the sake of seeing other people.

What Else Can Be Done?

Those are our favorite examples so far, but we're sure we'll come up with some more in the next few days. The FriendFeed search back-end sometimes barfs if you search friends of very popular users, but it seems to be holding up much better than it was a few weeks ago.

We love FriendFeed here at ReadWriteWeb - you can see all our accounts there via this slideshow.

What are some of the most powerful queries you've thought up with the new FriendFeed search? We'd love to know.