Posts Tagged ‘lifestream’

I just wrote a review of streamy.com last month. It’s a service that gives you Tweetdeck-like functions in a beautiful website. I was so impressed, I set it to my homepage.

It didn’t stay on my radar screen long.

Enter peoplebrowsr.com.

You’ll notice quickly that it has the ability to display as many columns as you want. You can shrink the column width or expand it. From there on it, it’s just downright amazing/fun to discover all that this site (and its corresponding Adobe Air app) can do. Everything is mouse-able.

I particularly love the ability to view my Twitter contacts’ “@” replies as a threaded conversation. That’s extremely handy for figuring what in the world is going on in your Twitterverse. Sure beats scrolling back a mile to figure out who said what.

Hovering over any contact photo gives you a plethora of options to respond to your contacts. Shift-clicking on a status update allows you do something pretty nifty… create a Tag Group.

The Adobe Air app has all the same features of the web site. One of the amazing things you’ll find about peoplebrowsr is that after many minutes exploring, you’ll discover that there are different levels of use for different levels of users. I typically use the Lite Mode, but there is also Advanced and Business Modes. Very nice.

The Settings are also a great feature at the bottom of the window. You have all kinds of options, and you can even change settings per each column.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one social media browser that combines the two most popular services – Facebook and Twitter, you may have finally found a great solution. Better than Tweetdeck. More full featured than Streamy. At home on whatever computer you choose… PeopleBrowsr.

Most of you know I’m an early adopter. Heck, I’m not just early, but I’m there in the delivery room, cheering on the birth of new techs, eager to cut the umbilical cord. (This is figurative because after my last literal experience doing that, I don’t think “eager” would describe my attitude…) However, I love to follow new technologies, particularly in the social media venue.

That’s why I accidentally sent out a massive bulk email last week from Friendfeed. I thought I was searching for my friends that already use the service (turns out, all 5 of them). What I actually did, however, was send an email to my entire Google contacts database – more than 1000 – urging folks to use Friendfeed. Don’t. It’s just not ready yet for consumer use. I don’t have time hear to gripe about FF’s imperfections (and they are many).

However, I saw a quick review of a service I’d not heard of called Streamy.com on TechCrunch.com, and of course, I clicked over to the service with mounting excitement. I had soothing baby music ready to play as I coddled this new addition to the world of lifestreaming. What I found, however, was a pretentious preteen. It was a full-featured, fast and consumer friendly service!

I had some problem figuring out how to create my account rather than just linking one with Facebook (in itself a nice feature). After solving that, I was off and running. The screenshot below shows you how I’ve configured (so far) my custom Streamy window.

Within a few moments, however, I was disappointed that I was apparently going to have to enter manually each blog I follow. I couldn’t figure out how to import my feeds from Bloglines or Google Reader. I clicked over to support (they use Get Satisfaction), found others with a similar question and clicked “I have the same question.”

Imagine my surprise when within a few hours later, I was notifed by email via the Get Satisfaction site that Streamy.com had created the option to import feeds from Bloglines, Google Reader and exported opml files! Talk about service (and satisfaction!).

I’ve now made Streamy.com my homepage in Safari and Firefox, and find that I am enjoying it more than drifting back and forth between Twitter and Facebook. I like it better than Tweetdeck because I can also keep up with my blog subscriptions. Yes, you can post to Facebook, Twitter and other services from it as well.

Swing by and check out Streamy. It may have, in one fell swoop, put Friendfeed and other services in the grave trying to keep up. (Of course, most parents of preteens feel that way at one point.)

I’ve written about Hellotxt.com before. It’s a wonderful service whose main competitor is Ping.fm. Another noteworthy alternative is Loopt.com (especially since they have a nice iPhone app). All these services provide you the ability to update your “statusphere” (multiple online social services) with one, single update. It even allows you to update selected services if you don’t want your “@somebody” responses on Twitter to go to your Facebook account.

While I use both Ping.fm and Hellotxt.com from my iPhone almost interchangeably, my web preference for status updates has shifted to Hellotxt. In fact, the Hellotxt.com website has had a significant, although quiet, update in the last month or so. It now streams the status updates of your friends from Twitter and Facebook. You can also reply to them directly from the Hellotxt site. Very nice.

While there are lots of desktop apps out right now that allow you check the status of your friends, the advantage of Hellotxt is being web-based. You take your social stream with you everywhere. If you haven’t signed up for an account yet, I highly recommend it.

I’m curious. If you update multiple your statusphere with a service, what is it? What desktop apps do you use to monitor it? What other websites are you aware of?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve used several sites to test out their lifestream capabilities. You can see some of them in other entries in this series. However, I wanted to comment on three in particular here: FriendFeed, Plaxo, and MyBlogLog.

Each of the three are able to take the different social networks you use and compile them into one RSS stream. You can see the result in the image below from my Plaxo feed:

Of those three, I would say that Plaxo and FriendFeed do the best job. MyBlogLog kept missing things, inexplicably. Also, with the first two, you can actually subscribe to this compiled RSS feed so that friends and family who have no life and want to live vicariously through you can subscribe to your lifestream feed from one of these services.

I continue to use the Actionstream plugin to pull my various feeds into my column on the right, but I suppose I could simply pull in one of the feeds from these two services above, rather than enter all the different feeds individually in the plugin. I am also using the RSS Stream plugin to generate the feeds on this page.

I’ve yet to decide which service I’ll use the most. I find myself using Plaxo to help sync my contacts the most – it works great with Mac Address Book. Google has yet to develop a nice lifestream or a way to sync contacts with the Mac well, or I would probably be using it because with BusySync (review to come later), I can now sync my Google calendars with my iCal from either end.

I think there’s a lifestream race on at the moment. The service that compiles all of these features into one of easy integration with your computer and portable device will win out. (Hello, iPhone?)

Oh, and of course, there’s Tumblr…

I am completely sold on hellotxt.com. I’ve been using it for the past three days, and have had no issues with it at all. It does exactly what it says. With one entry, I can update ALL of the following services with a single click: Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Plaxo.

That’s pretty amazing! Gone are the days of updating Facebook when I happen to be on it (which is more and more these days) and a random Twitter from my cell while I’m on the road. Now I can send the same status update to all services (if I wish). The only thing that is a small hitch is for my Tumblr blog which I have set to import updates from many of these. Unfortunately, now it means that the same status is duplicated for them. Where before my Facebook status was different from my Twitter status, now they’re the same (unless I choose to simply send it to a specified selection of the above services rather than all of them).

I can heartily and highly recommend this fantastic service!