Not everyone loves FriendFeed – its social media firehouse qualities can lead to a lot of noise which can certainly be overwhelming to newcomers. However, even those who don’t participate on the service may see the value of a lifestream. By hosting your own lifestream, you can easily share your current activities from across the social web with your web site’s visitors. Once set up, it’s somewhat like a passive form of a Tumblr blog. You continue your usual activities – upload photos to flickr, favorite videos on YouTube, bookmark pages on del.icio.us – and your web site will reflect those changes.
One of the newest applications that provides a hosted lifestream is Sweetcron. This app automatically updates with your latest activities, but unlike a FriendFeed account, this lifestream is completely customizable by editing its template. It’s also self-hosted. Much in the way that WordPress can be self-hosted on your own server, so can Sweetcron. But the biggest difference is that Sweetcron is 100% open source. Developers can write their own php classes to extend the Sweetcron software.
Sweetcron was designed by Yongfook, a freelance web producer based in Tokyo. You can see an example of what Sweetcron looks like on his blog:
A Sweetcron Lifestream
Back in April, Mark Krynsky interviewed Yongfook to get some more details about the service. He learned that Sweetcron will require php5 and MySQL5 and items are stored in the database so people can page through the stream and perform searches. You’ll also be able to remove items from the stream via Sweetcron’s GUI. However, the big difference between Sweetcron and WordPress is that it will not support hot-swappable themes. Instead, you will use the GUI to make your changes – like adding text, selecting colors, or pasting in your own CSS. Beyond that, you’ll need to edit the templates directly.
At the time, Yongfook said Sweetcron would be available in June, but the web site still shows that’s it’s an email waiting list. Yongfook’s blog states “Don’t bug me about Sweetcron. I’ll launch it soon. Promise”…so we won’t bug him, but we are excited.
