Lifestreams for Beginners

It is becoming increasingly difficult for socially connected people to keep up with all their own online activities, never mind their friends. Skinflakes, for example, writes posts on a variety of sites including, Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Clipmarks, Zimbio, Blogger, and Wordpress. We are also looking to create a presence on YouTube, facebook, and Scribld . Clearly this strategy allows people using a variety of different services to find out about Skinflakes. However, our posts are strewn all over the net making it difficult for people to access all of our content.

FriendFeed, Socialthing, and Dipity are examples of a new generation of websites that allow you to organise all you and your friends’ social media activities into one place. They allow you to create a new page or "lifestream" made up of content written in various social media sites.

Some of you may have noticed the mini blog column that runs down the left hand column of our Skinflakes. This feature is simply uses the lifestream created by FriendFeed to bring together all of our social media content into the mini blog.

Of course you can also use FriendFeed to keep up to date with friends who use services that are not your bag. So if you have friends that uses Pownce instead of Twitter you can use FriendFeed to bring their updates into one place. You can also use FriendFeed as a simple web based RSS reader to create a constantly updated list of interesting things. For more about web based RSS readers check out one of our previous posts.

FriendFeed is not the only service in town. Dipity is a new service that gives you the option of displaying posts in a timeline a feature that gives a deeper insight into how people spend their time online. SocialThing looks like a much prettier version of FriendFeed that has been recently acquired by AOL but, for the moment you need an invite to sign up to this service.

How to put a FriendFeed on your blog

• Sign up to FriendFeed

• Add friends from facebook or from your email address book

• Click on “next see your FriendFeed”.

• You need to link your accounts by clicking on the surprise surprise “link your accounts” link

• When you have added all the services click on feed to "view your feed".

• If you want to add a service that isn’t on the list – just click on blog and past in an rss feed link for a service you are interested in eg feeds.feedburner.com/skinflakes will give you posts from skinflakes on your FriendFeed.

• You can also use FriendFeed like Twitter and post messages directly on to your feed

• When you are happy with the contents of your FriendFeed - copy the link for your FriendFeed

• Go to your dashboard in blogger and click on layout

• Add a new gadget – select “feed” and past in your FriendFeed link

• Save the changes and view the FriendFeed on your blog