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.

First, the open source platforms

WordPress with the Lifestream plugin by David Kramer from Enthropia Labs. You can see this one in action on Open Parenthesis.

WordPress Lifestream Plugin Output from Open Parenthesis

I really like the plugin’s approach, which is to leverage WordPress and enable you to put your lifestream up as a page, as well as providing a widget you can put on your blog homepage. (Of course you can use WordPress without using the blog engine at all – in which case it is more like the standalone options). It’s very simple to install and configure, and supports a wide variety of places from which you might want to pull feeds:

Lifestream Plugin for WordPress Add Feed Screen

The Lifestream plugin can group items by day to avoid clutter (days when I work from home and listen to lots of tracks on Last.fm, or upload 30 photos to flickr, that single source can easily overwhelm a lifestream) – though that isn’t available for all feed types. The plugin is also themable and extendable, which is key – you can add feed types, custom icons, or change display options at will.

Movable Type Open Source edition with the ActionStreams plugin. I was very excited when the Action Streams plugin came out, and set up JohnEckman.com on MT just to be able to run it. Heck, I even wrote a few plugins for Action Stream parsing. However, I’ve been really lax about staying up to date with new releases. Having a number of blogs already on WordPress makes it far more likely I will keep that updated. I know many folks use and love Movable Type but its mental model of how a blog works is just not in synch with mine the way WordPress is.

MTOS based Lifestream from JohnEckman.com

That said, if you’re used to Movable Type’s approach, using the Action Streams plugin certainly provides a flexible, pluggable, themable way to aggregate your lifestream.

Sweetcron an open source application built using the Code Igniter framework – see this one in action at nastyhack.org/sweetcron/.

Sweetcron based Lifestream

Unfortunately, the original developer has since moved on to other things and no replacement has clearly emerged yet. I like that it operates as a kind of standalone platform, not tied to a blogging engine, and gives you good theming potential – but I worry about the long term prospects for the project without a clear leader organizing and directing contributors. On the plus side, there are many great themes for Sweetcron, and if you’re familiar with code igniter as a framework .

Storytlr – what was once a SaaS option but has ceased operations and released their code as an open source project – you can see my lifestream at nastyhack.org/storytlr/.

Storytlr based lifestream

There will be some work to do make the project more amenable to self-hosting (it was built to operate as a service), but it has the benefit of starting from a solid working foundation, not starting from scratch.

They’ve also got a multiuser version, something which was often requested for Sweetcron but wasn’t forthcoming. (Will the WordPress Lifestream plugin work on WordPress Multi-user, which is being merged into the core code in 3.0? Don’t know yet).

Hosted offerings:

Chi.mp My Account) – Hosted service which serves as an OpenID provider as well as aggregating your lifestream. Integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, any RSS feed. Also enables you to import contacts from online address books. Seems to have gotten stuck on some old photos in its Flickr import and is failing to import newer content? (Haven’t spent much time troubleshooting here – mostly using it as a backup OpenID for when my primary one fails). Their focus has always been on enabling you to own your own data – allowing you to export all of your contacts and updates out of the site as a zip, which they still do, with appropriately microformatted content throughout. If I were to rely on a hosted version, this would be my top pick.

Flavors.me (My Account – but check their user directory for better examples) – Hosted service, supports (as of 12/24) flickr, tumblr, twitter, vimeo, last.fm, facebook, goodreads, netflix, and generic RSS. Gets bonus points for using OAuth appropriately and not requesting usernames/passwords where they aren’t necessary. Offers some basic layouts and admin-side design flexibility (fonts, colors, backgrounds, and the like. (See this great review on the Lifestream blog for more info).

FriendFeed (My Account) – Arguably the giant in this space until getting acquired by Facebook. Probably keep this around as long as it exists, and do sometimes follow folks here, but not somewhere I’m spending much time anymore.

Plaxo Pulse (My Account). Plaxo seems to be where my less internet-savvy family and friends get updates. Folks who aren’t on Facebook, or Twitter, or spending lots of time reading blogs and other RSS feeds, but get a periodic “pulse” from Plaxo of what’s going on in their network. For that reason alone I’ll probably never take it down. They’ve also got Joseph Smarr and John McCrea, who’ve been pushing for the open social web, open standards, and data portability. (Updated: Smarr’s moving to Google). They’re supporting OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and other new standards as soon as they are introduced, and I like that they’re good web citizens (and have continued to be, post acquisition by Comcast). That said, it still feels to me like a downstream destination for a specific kind of consumer, not the central place I’d think of as my lifestream.

Ones I haven’t set up or tried to use: Lifestream.fm, AIM Lifestream.

What are you using? What have I missed out on altogether?

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:

The problem is that when I send brightkite a message like: @bos

It sometimes knows that is Logan Airport in Boston, and sometimes just knows that as BOS, United States, which results in updates like this:

Anyone know why this is happening? Brightkite’s fault? Fire Eagle’s fault? Neither?

Update: Should perhaps have checked first. Brightkite seems to be working on this issue, at least according to this post on GetSatisfaction. Seems like they recognize some airport shortcodes but may not always have the full name associated with it and what city/state they are in.

Since my FireEagle feed only updates with city level info, you can’t see that it is an airport.

Hopefully this will mean fewer “United States” updates in my feed over time.

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).

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.

Check out the work in progress at johneckman.com. Read on if you’re interested in creating your own action streams.

Although it has been a while since I’ve worked in Movable Type, it was a relatively painless install (assuming you’ve got the basic LAMP stuff in place).

The challenge was creating additional “services” for this blog and goatless. There’s some basic info on writing new services in this blog post: “building action streams” – but it took some time to translate this into my way of thinking about it, including where the png file goes for the icon for the service.

Here’s what the config.yaml looks like for the OpenParenthesis service:

name: Open Parenthesis
id: openparenthesis
key: openparenthesis
author_link: http://johneckman.com/
author_name: John Eckman
description: Adds profile service and activity stream for Open Parenthesis
version: 1.0
plugin_link: http://johneckman.com/

profile_services:
    openparenthesis:
        name: Open Parenthesis
        url: http://www.openparenthesis.org/
        icon: images/openparenthesis.png

action_streams:
    openparenthesis:
        posted:
            name: Posts
            description: New Posts to the Blog
            html_form: '[_1] blogged on <a
                href="http://www.openparenthesis.org/">OpenParenthesis</a>
                about <a href="[_2]">[_3]</a>'
            html_params:
                - url
                - title
            url: 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/OpenParenthesis/'
            identifier: url
            xpath:
                foreach: //item
                get:
                    created_on: pubDate/child::text()
                    url: link/child::text()
                    title: title/child::text()

This config.yaml file goes in mt/plugins/openparenthesis/config.yaml – that is, you create a new plugin folder containing just this config.yaml.

Then you put the openparenthesis.png in: mt/mt-static/plugins/openparenthesis/images/openparenthesis.png

I suppose much of this would have been obvious had I been more accustomed to how MT plugins work.

You may also note I’m just hardcoding a pointer to my feedburner feed – so technically there is no “{{ident}}” needed – it doesn’t matter what identifer I put in.

One could translate this by changing:
url: 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/OpenParenthesis/'
to:
url: 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/{{ident}}/'

And then entering the feed name (the only part of a feedburner feed which changes) into the identifier field when adding the service to your profile from the MT admin side. That would give you a generic FeedBurner feed, to add blog postings to your action stream.

Of course, this may not make sense if your blog is itself on Movable Type, since your blog postings will be directly in your feed, but if you’re creating your action stream on separate domain, it may come in handy.

You can create extra “profile” links which offer no streams as well. For now I’ve just cheated with the link to Optaros at the top of my “Find Me Elsewhere” list.