Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Lifestreaming or the Robbie Clutton problem

With horror (ok delight really), I read about the "Robbie Clutton" problem on Simon's blog. It's interesting how a disgruntled post seems to get more traction, but hey ho.

Check out that post, then come back.

Ok, finished?

Good.

Something I've been thinking about recently is how to make lifestreaming easier for everyone. At the moment, I've seen blogs about doing that using Yahoo! Pipes, which is cool, but let's make it easier.

Any volunteers to help build a life stream site welcome =)

7 comments:

psd said...

Cristiano has been thinking about this too: http://blog.cristianobetta.com/2007/11/23/how-to-build-your-own-lifestream-with-yahoo-pipes-and-no-server-side-logic/

and then there is http://lifestre.am

Robbie said...

both cool, but how can we turn (or encourage) something like that from specific to one person, to something where anyone can enter their links and get a unique feed back of all their webby goodness?

Cristiano Betta said...

Honestly, it is interesting to make a dedicated site, but there are a few issues.

People like me will always want to have this stuff on their own site, so either make it a widget or something that I can integrate in my own site or die ;) Before I used Yahoo Pipes I used to sent people to http://cbetta.jaiku.com, but honestly sending people to your own url is nicer.

For all the other people we need something which is a reverse of netvibes: a site that I can use as a homepage for my friends to go to to find stuff about ME. This might sound like facebook, but I am thinking less interactive and more pulling in data from third party sources. There are some sites that do that already like meecard.com, but I don't think they work/look particularly right yet.

Robbie said...

Hey Cristiano,

I haven't checked out meecard.com, but I found onaswarm.com on PSDs del.icio.us stream which seems cool. It also has a widget built into it, you can check mine on www.iclutton.com .

I might see if I can surface that link as something like lifestream.iclutton.com.

Robbie

Cristiano Betta said...

Nice, not exactly what I wanted but almost. Obviously I am picky so I would love to be able to style the lifestream, use under my own url, etc. Still, for most people this is just what they need.

Robbie said...

Cristiano, I suppose at the very least you do get the feed and you could do a transform to present the feeds as you'd really like on your own site. As the site is in beta, we could always petition changes =)

David P. Janes said...

A few quick notes:

- you can create a widget from your page: there's a "create widget" of every page. Here's examples of what this looks like here:

http://www.davidjanes.com/onaswarm/

- every page has a summary RSS feed which you repurpose using whatever tools you prefer for dealing with that

- you'll be able to style the page (somewhat) soon using blogger templates

- we're always open to suggestions, if there's something you think you need that's not there

- we do have the capability of hosting sites under your own URL; we're just not exposing this function yet because it tends to be a maintenance nightmare but we may add this later.