Confessions of a technophile

I've just received my invitation to participate in a private beta for lifestrea.ms, a new social web aggregator. The service was previously called YoWhassup!, but its German creators decided to change it to lifestrea.ms because of some connotations associated with the earlier name. So far, the service looks promising:

"lifestrea.ms brings together all kinds of things that you and your social network create on the web in one place. There you decide who sees what. You can share and re-publish your contents and even add additional texts and media from your lifestrea.ms dashboard. To make sharing your life easier, lifestrea.ms breaks down your social life into seven of the most important parts: public, family, friends, local, professional, romantic and secret. You have one fully adjustable profile for each of your networks. The same way you share your life with others, your network contacts share their life with you. To keep you in the loop, you can even read your newsfeeds ('cause these are written by people you follow) and your emails ('cause these are people that contact you) from inside your dashboard. Staying on top of what's going on has never been more effortless, so come and join today and start communicating with all your friends, family and colleagues in a new way."

At first sight, lifestre.ms looks like any other aggregator like Flock and Multiply. However, the best part of lifestrea.ms is this:

"As lifestrea.ms stores information about what you read, what you post and what you communicate, we are able to enhance this data semantically and generate a stream of attention data for each of your profiles from this. That way you have a continuously updated APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) file on each of your profile pages. By using all these open standards you as a user have full control over your data and you as a developer can build new applications on top of this.

Lifestrea.ms even enables users for the first time to practice the vision of a Portable Social Network and the Open Social Graph (not to be compared with the widget-only Google OpenSocial). But we don't calculate your APML only for external purposes. It's also in heavy use inside your dashboard. From your attention data we calculate what newsfeeds have a high priority for you, what new topics could be of interest for you and what people you should get to know, 'cause they are heading for the same things. We suggest feeds, topics and people (anonymously) to you as soon as we find them in your - you guessed it - live dashboard."

So far, I haven't received many useful feeds from the limited tagging and voting on the items that stream into my dashboard, but I'm expecting it to get better as I go along. Let me know if you want to try this out, I'll send you an invite.

Labels: technology, web 2.0
Posted by Aaron Tan at 1:45 PM |