Lifestreaming Sites Organize Web Lives

By RACHEL METZ

NEW YORK — Slowly but surely, my online life has spiraled out of control.

Between posting photos on Flickr, updating my status on Facebook, blogging and commenting on and perusing various other sites, I’m having trouble keeping all my activities straight. And keeping track of what my friends are up to on the Web gets even harder.

But there is a way to keep it all together: lifestreaming sites. These online destinations, many of which are quite new, are like overlooks that o’er a panoramic view of what you and your friends are doing on social media sites across the Internet.

If you’ve used Facebook, you’re familiar with how it offers a running list of “feeds” detailing your friends’ activities: which programs they’ve added to their Facebook profiles, for example, and which new people they’ve connected with. Lifestreaming sites are a supercharged version of that.

I tested several of these sites to see whether they would help me get organized — better in touch with what my friends are writing and doing..

FriendFeed: FriendFeed is an easy-to-use starting point for organizing your Web life and sharing your thoughts about it with other people. Friendfeed can gather updates from dozens of social Web sites, making it simple to arrange all my Twitter posts, Gmail Chat status updates and other online tidbits in one profile.

I also wanted to use FriendFeed to collect all my friends’ activities. This was simplified by the site’s option to search my Gmail address book for FriendFeed users.

Feeds on the site were not that visually appealing — basically long lists with small icons that indicated the sites my friends and I were using, and links to extended posts we had written. If someone posted photos to Flickr, thumbnails linked to the larger photos would show up in the feed.

But the feeds still made it much easier to see everybody’s Twitter updates, blog posts, Flickr uploads and more, without having to bounce around the Web.

Also, the site has a neat feature that lets you organize your friends into groups. For example, you can put together a list showing only your o+ce colleagues’ feeds, and another with just your closest buddies.

Profilactic: People looking to funnel the most social Web content onto one site may like Profilactic. The site can tap into almost 200 social media sites. Users can also add feeds from other sites.

Aggregating all these activities through Profilactic can definitely cut down on social media site surfing time, and it was easy to set up my personal “Lifestream” with sites I frequent. But it often took longer to load content about my friends than on the other lifestreaming sites I tried, which was irritating.

However, I liked that Profilactic was smart about mining the lists of friends I have on some other sites. For example, I added Flickr to my profile, and Profilactic then imported my Flickr friends’ photo uploads — even though these friends weren’t registered as my buddies on Profilactic proper.

Swurl: Though it can’t gather information from as many sites as FriendFeed or Profilactic, Swurl’s looks set it apart.

The site was my favorite in part because of its very clever “Timeline” feature, which let me see all my online activities on one page, organized into a calendar-like grid. I could then click each square of the grid to see details.

Unfortunately, Swurl doesn’t have the same option for viewing my friends’ activities. Instead, they show up as a long “Friends” feed, similar to those on Profilactic and FriendFeed.

Swurl supports a number of different Web sources, including Facebook and Twitter and a variety of blogging platforms like TypePad, Tumblr and WordPress.

Swurl also automatically scanned the sites I was monitoring to recognize activities by the contacts I had stored on those sites, and placed them into my “Friends” feed.

Also, users should keep in mind that information you share on Swurl is publicly available to those who know –or can guess — your handle on the site, as Swurl profiles’ Internet addresses follow a “username.swurl.com” pattern.

If you’re having trouble keeping yourself organized on the Web, a lifestreaming site may help. I definitely felt more connected by using Swurl and FriendFeed in particular.

I don’t think they’ll replace visiting sites one at a time.

Posting and perusing the old fashioned way is much more varied and visually stimulating.

It also bothered me that these tools could soon be necessary for wrangling my online life. I began to think maybe I should just spend less time online — though realistically, that’s not going to happen.

Originally published by RACHEL METZ Associated Press.

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