With a personal blog, a Flickr account and Twitter you could say that my online identity is all over the place.
My blog does show my last 5 tweets and a random selection of Flickr photos but the main thing you notice when you visit it is that I haven’t been regularly blogging lately. IT simply isn’t a good representation of all my activities online. It looks like we are all waiting for a new format to bring all our online content together in one place.
Is FriendFeed the solution?
The next version of WordPress maybe?
Will Facebook solve our problems by integrating all?
Nobody really knows.
Amplifeeder (‘a distributed social activity aggregator’) hopes to offer a solution to at least combine all your feeds in one screen. You could describe it as a meta search engine for your own stuff. It pulls data from FriendFeed, Twitter, Flickr, your blog, any RSS feed and a few other sources and displays them on one page. Voila; your own Lifestream.
As a test I have set-up my own Lifestream page at http://boris.amplifeeder.com/
As you can see it all works just fine. Not surprisingly as the technology to pull in feeds is not very complicated. Amplifeeder offers an easy to use Dashboard where you can choose different templates and adjust your settings. It even shows me some basic stats so I know what I’m spending too much time on.
Conclusion: I don’t see myself abandoning my blog OR putting the address of my Lifestream on my business cards on anything like that. But Amplifeeder is a nice effort to solve the problem of scattered personal content.
The downside? you’ll need to have access to a server to install this bad boy.
The good news? Your in complete control.
You have nothing to lose by setting up your own Lifestream there so why not give it a try?
How did you create your page? How do you install it? You have to download it or is there a hosted version?
I have been using it for a while now on my domain (paul.kinlan.me) and my dad’s (frank.kinlan.me). It just works and looks beautiful…. what was cool is that I pulled in my configuration from FriendFeed so it took about 2 seconds to setup.
Yeah, weird isn’t it? :-)
Lol,
The percentage of MicroBlog is really micro…
Similar like SweetCron – http://www.sweetcron.com/
Just give this a quick look and it seems that http://storytlr.com/ is better. You can see a demo here http://ls.ninhnv.com
Yeah, it’s not a self hosted application but if I have to choose I will pick storytlr or sweetcron. I don’t want to get pain in ass with IIS, permissions, and scalable.
yes. your point? amplifeeder data is stored and owned by YOU, not another 3rd party service.
JP, nice write-up on Amplifeeder. I’d argue that the comparison between Amplifeeder and Storytlr is not which is better, completely dependent upon the needs of user.
I will say this, Amplifeeder is much more elegant than SweetCron and if I self-hosted my lifestream I would definitely use Amplifeeder over SweetCron. JD has made a much more elegant backend that coders and designers alike are going to appreciate more over SweetCron.
I’m doing something like that with the drupal install on my davidherron.com site. There are various Drupal modules for integrating feeds of data from elsewhere. e.g. my blogs get teasers aggregated from their RSS feed onto davidherron.com. The display format is a big off in that out of the box it’s in river-of-news but I suppose some work with the views module could change that. Hurm..
There is an Install instructions on the Amplifeeder site. Jon mentioned that he is nearing the end of the Web Platform Installer process so it should be a one click install soon to get it all installed.
The Microblog percentage is for the built in Microblog, not a count of external services. There are no posts made with the internal system in the graph so the percentage is nill. I’ll make it clearer in the docs. Thanks!
Can’t tell why storytlr is any better at all.
i like storytlr too but they own your data. amplifeeder is self hosted and you can do what you like with your data. plus the storytlr themes are pretty poor compared with amplifeeders. just sayin…
not as good as http://jdee.amplifeeder.com :)
If I wasn’t wrong, friendfeed also collects and hosts our data?
your choice of hosting platform is your choice of hosting platform. doesnt make storytlr better. it plainly isnt. theres plenty of people who view LAMP as a pain in the ass. as for saying IIS doesnt scale….you are sounding a little silly tbh.
Sure, it’s best if we can control our data by ourselves. My point is I trust friendfeed and the same as with storytlr. It’s not that bad.
Yeah yeah, I was wrong when I compared a hosting platform with a self-hosted platform. If controling your own data is your top goal then self-hosted platform will be the best. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for me. Peace.