Published on Thursday, December 24 2009
For a while now I’ve been testing out a few lifestreaming platform options. My current shortlist includes four open source approaches / platforms and two hosted offerings.
I think ultimately I’ll want to keep an open source (LAMP) platform because I want to own the data in my lifestream, have backups of it, and be able to move it around as I please. This leaves me choosing between a platform linked to a blog (WordPress or MovableType) or a standalone one (Sweetcron, Storytlr or similar) that just powers the lifestream. Originally I created JohnEckman.com as a standalone lifestream, thinking that the various blogs I wrote for around the web could be aggregated there – but there’s no reason why that couldn’t be a WordPress install as well.
Anyway, what follows are my notes / first impressions – not an exhaustive evaluation certainly but a good shortlist to start with if you’re thinking of running a lifestream.
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Published on Friday, July 4 2008
Identi.ca is a new micro-blogging service which runs the open source Laconica platform.
Ultimately, this will likely be the distributed, open microblogging platform twitter fans have been waiting for (though the community itself seems mostly to be sticking with Twitter, fail whale and all).
For now, it’s just fun to play around with.
I just releases an Identi.ca action stream plugin – get version 1.0 on my Movable Type Action Streams Plugins page.
Here’s what the output looks like:
Published on Wednesday, June 11 2008
I use BrightKite to update my location via SMS, and it feeds FireEagle, which in turn posts to my lifestream via Movable Type and the Action Streams Plugin. If any of that made sense, keep reading. ;)
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Published on Saturday, May 31 2008
(Via the TripIt blog)
TripIt has launched profiles for travelers, with some pretty good controls on what is public and what is private:
The immediate goal is to give TripIt travelers one place to track all their travel information and showcase their travel history. The profile includes basic information about a traveler, including home location, upcoming trip destinations, connections in TripIt as well as important travel statistics like miles traveled, days on the road, etc.
It’s got a nice, RESTful public url – mine’s at http://www.tripit.com/people/jeckman
I’ve updated my TripIt Action Stream plugin – the good news is that it will now provide a real profile link rather than just linking to the TripIt homepage.
You will, however, have to make your activity feed available to everyone – but if you didn’t want to do that, you probably don’t want to publish your activity feed as an action stream anyway. (Actually you could leave your activity stream private and still publish your profile link – just uncheck the activity feed checkbox when adding the profile inside MT).
Published on Thursday, April 10 2008
As regular readers of Open Parenthesis know, I’ve been using Movable Type Open Source (and particularly the Action Streams plugin) on JohnEckman.com to create a life stream of activity.
It’s basically a roll-your-own lifestream, though for now at least it isn’t integrated to anyone else’s streams, as in Friendfeed or Socialthing.
This morning I posted a new plugin which picks up TripIt Activity Streams.
TripIt’s activity stream is a private Atom feed which posts an item whenever you begin a trip, complete a trip, or start planning a trip. For example, here’s a recent entry from my feed:
You can download the plugin from the MTAS page.
