Tag Archives: Lifestream

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Taking a Tumble

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Probably to a general chorus of ‘Oh no, not another thing!’ I’m giving a Tumblelog a try. The wikipedia entry explains the concept pretty well – it is essentially a short-form blog, so the posts will be a mixture of links, pictures, quotes and short text rather than the long-form stuff that I post here.

As a concept it does overlap somewhat with things like the aside posts that I have on here, and my link blog which links to articles I’ve found interesting that have come up in my Google Reader feeds. The difference is that the Tumblelog brings in various other forms, and is useful for linking to items that aren’t in Google Reader where I’ve previously had to fiddle around with to link to.

The Tumblelog can be found at http://tumblr.peat.me.uk, and is also added as a sidebar item to the main page of this site, and comes complete with it’s own RSS feed.

However by far the easiest way to keep up with all the different sites I use is to head over to FriendFeed or Plaxo Pulse, both of which are combining all the various feeds from blogs, link blogs, tumblelogs, pictures and so on into one. You can find my FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/rtpeat.

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Am I a Lifestream Junkie?

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So I’m now trying out a third Lifestream utility – well fourth or fifth if you include the people bar on Flock or the solution I cobbled together using Facebook applications. Thanks to an article on TechCrunch this morning, I’m trying out a beta release of SocialThing! alongside FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse.

I have to say, I didn’t set out to run three in parallel. I tried out FriendFeed to use as a replacement for the multiple applications on Facebook. The big problem with those was that not all of them updated automatically – thanks to limitations in the applications, some of them often needed a kick to get updates to be registered. FriendFeed takes feeds from all of the sites I use day to day, and posts them eventually into my Facebook feeds. Thanks to the way FriendFeed works – using RSS feeds, plus the vagaries of updates to the Facebook mini-feed it does sometimes take a little while for updates to get through.

The Plaxo Pulse account came as a side effect of my having given Plaxo a go for trying to get my address book and calendar details transferred to home. Again this is using RSS feeds for updates so is a bit slow.

Having said that, whilst both sites bring together all of my own updates, they don’t bring together all my friends updates unless they also sign up to the relevant site. FriendFeed has a couple of contacts, as does Plaxo, but on my people bar on Flock there are massively more people. The other annoyance with Flock is that the people bar is totally independent on each of the different computers that I am running it on.

This is the particular advantage of SocialThing!. Unlike FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse it isn’t working on RSS feeds – instead, in much the same way as Flock it uses the various API’s provided by the supported sites to link all of your information together. Again as with Flock this limits the number of supported third-party sites, however it does mean that it gives me a complete view of all of my friends in one place without them having to sign up on the SocialThing! site.

SocialThing! have a new little FAQ document which explains the differences between what they are trying to do and FriendFeed. Whilst I can see from the explanation how they’re different, my thought is that to the man on the street the difference is pretty subtle, FriendFeed, SocialThing! and Plaxo Pulse, along with a number of other sites are all doing essentially the same thing, and certainly a good few of them are going to fall by the way side.

Having said that, on initial impressions if SocialThing! can get things into the Facebook mini-feed and also support my blog, that would remove the need for FriendFeed… Equally if FriendFeed can pull in all my friends from various services automatically in the same way as SocialThing! has done, then I could go with FriendFeed – and of course the same applies to Plaxo Pulse. They are all doing slightly different things, which if combined would offer me the solution I wanted. Until then, I guess I’m going to continue looking like a Lifestream Junkie…

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Trying out FriendFeed

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friendfeed-logo.gif

You may have come across the announcement today that FriendFeed, a so called lifestreaming utility has come out of private beta and is open to the general public.

The general idea is somewhat similar to the News Feed or Mini Feed concept in Facebook. Within Facebook the two feeds collect together news stories about people – the News Feed being a collection of stories about your friends, and the Mini Feed being specifically about one person. The big problem is that unless you add extra applications to do so, the feeds only include stories about events that occur within Facebook. I’ve got around that somewhat using a selection of applications to highlight when I upload new pictures to Flickr, share an item from Google Reader, or post to my blog, but the applications vary in how they work, and some need a kick to update their information.

FriendFeed collects together information about all those sites, plus a large number of others, and produces a single feed of all my updates – the equivalent of the Facebook mini feed. It also brings together a combined feed of friends – either for real if they have their own FriendFeed accounts, or through imaginary friends – placeholders for feeds effectively – that users can set up for friends not on the system, giving the equivalent of the Facebook news feed. On top of that, it also has a nice little Facebook application that allows all this information to be automatically put into the Facebook feeds, so I can effectively ditch the mix and match solution I have currently – and also get rid of the need to give the system a kick when I update.

I’ll have to see how FriendFeed behaves over the next few days – so far it’s been okay, although it did seem to take an interminably long time to update earlier on – having cleared out a lot of Facebook applications, that seems to have alleviated the problem. Just have to see how it goes from here. It’s not just about sharing items – the system also gives the opportunity to comment on shared items with FriendFeed – will be interesting to see how that works too.

I’m actually only utilising seven of the twenty-eight different services FriendFeed aggregates, so perhaps I’m not testing it quite as hard as some may be. Anyway, if anyone is interested in my feed, you can find it here – although you’ll have to sign up to follow me as the feed is private.