StoryTlr, a lifestreaming service that debuted to a lot of positivepress last year, has (among several other enhancements) debuted a major new feature today: Pages. This is a new gallery format view of selected portions of a total lifestream, essentially as a slideshow. StoryTlr adds this new ability to its already rich aggregation support of different social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, RSS feeds and Digg. Also updated is support for tags and a new theme.
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.
