xdiscipline

I have been using this lifestreaming service called FriendFeed. If you don’t know about it, it logs your web activity from the websites you choose and makes it easy to share with others.

For example, people see when I upload photos to Flickr, change my status message at Twitter, bookmark something with Delicious while reading something in Google Reader, or love a song at Last.fm. 

I like the (rather perceived than actual) immediacy of it. You can initiate/join really quick (and ephemeral) conversations with people around shared content. 

I decided to show my activity on my website as well, through this Wordpress plugin, hence the sidebar on the right. The information is not up to date to the minute, since it takes a while for FriendFeed to receive information from other services added on RSS updating issues. But it’s definitely more up to date then the rest of  my website ;) 

This sidebar makes me think: what if I can host my own FriendFeed like I do Wordpress? And, the wonderful world of internets (Chris Messina, to be more precise) leads me to this emerging, open source, self-hosted lifestream software called Sweetcron, from the prolific Yongfook. I even downloaded and set it up to try, you can see a running demo at xdiscipline.com/lifestream.

Sweetcron is nowhere close to Wordpress right now, with its bugs and naive admin interface. But I must say, I see a lot of promise in this thing. It is sustainable in the sense that it keeps your audience connected through automated micro-updates. In other words, it recycles web activities so that even if we don’t post, we have something going on our sites. This way, we all might not have to write those apologetic posts about how we have not been updating.