The other day I saw Chris Prillo sent out a message announcing that he was launching Lockergnome.net as a free Wordpress blog / Lifestream Archive. Of course I quickly had to go see what Chris was up to here. Here’s a post where Chris explains why you should sign up for the service.

After visiting the site I realized that Chris was using BuddyPress to power it. Buddypress is a way to add a social network layer on top of Wordpress MU. I then started to test the site out and later saw that Chris had left me a message on it. I asked him about the motivation for creating the service which he responded to in a follow up post where he stated the following:

Been wanting to try BuddyPress for quite some time. Been wanting to host WordPress blogs for quite some time. Been wanting to help people archive their Social Media Lifestream data in a non-proprietary, fully exportable system for quite some time.

Ok fair enough, I can dig those reasons. So with BuddyPress, users can sign up and create their own blogs on the service utilizing Wordpress. To enable the Lifestreaming functionality, every blog has an install of the very popular WP Lifestream plugin. Also, they’ve setup the microblog inspired P2 theme as the default and only selection available with the free service. Premium accounts are available for $12.77 a month and powered by Page.ly which presumably will allow you to gain complete control over the blog as you would have from a standard self-hosted deployment allowing tweaks and installation of additional plugins and themes. click image to see Lifestream settings page When I first heard about the release of BuddyPress I quickly thought about how this could be used as a tool to create your own private Lifestreaming community which is exactly what he’s done here. Unfortunately the actual Lifestream activity itself seems to be relegated to the individual user blogs themselves and doesn’t appear on the home page under the “Site Wide Activity” which I think would be a nicer implementation that would expose user activity to the whole community. As it stands that section displays blog posts by users, wire posts (think Facebook Wall posts), and inter-network activity such as friending notifications. I’d really like to see the Lifestreaming activity integrated more. Chris has created a pretty geeky and tech-centric community and connecting with that crowd on its own merit is a worthy reason for joining the service. Besides that you can also join to play around with a live BuddyPress implementation. Lastly, if you’ve heard about the WP Lifestream and always wanted to play with it but either don’t have a Wordpress site or didn’t yet feel comfortable installing it, you can now test it easily for free. Just remember you need to create a blog after you sign up to get access to Wordpress and the plugin. Finally if you’re interested in setting up your own multi-user Lifestreaming community I’ve compiled a list of several options that are available besides BuddyPress. I’ll continue to watch the community on Lockergnome and you can connect with me here if you decide to try it out.

A blog all about lifestreaming

Tangled Up in Blue... a cool blue Sweetcron theme putting your blog up top, your lifestream below.

"Wow this is a hot looking SweetCron implementation"

Marshall Kirkpatrick (ReadWriteWeb)

Download | Demo (coming! - this site runs on it atm)

Please follow the 10 steps in the Readme.txt carefully!

Evolved from Boxdaddy, based on YongFook's classic Boxy theme, has been tested on Sweetcron 1.08e and has:

• Tabbed navigation for single source activity
• 'Link/blog/video/photo/audio' labels for items
• Full, blog & page RSS feeds (i.e. feeds for search, tags, services etc)
• A nice user interface using service colors and rounded corners in CSS3
• A blog display area at the top of the homepage (thanks to teh blog ar (not) dead)
• All items news shares and links go straight to original source
• Audio players for both Blip.fm and Last.fm
• Twitter lives in the sidebar now - way too noisy for this Sweetcron
• A friendfeed page for the hell of it
• Disqus integration (just add your username to files)

I've added a plugin folder with the relevant plugins bundled inside the zip. 

(Update: Version 1.1 includes IE fixes - 23/1)

User requirements: some PHP and CSS knowledge

If you have any problems, post them to the Sweetcron Code Group thread Comments, ideas and feedback welcome!

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)Lifestreaming was a big thing for social media in 2008, and surely will be even bigger in 2009. Thanks to sites like FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm and others, we can easily aggregate our social activities into one central place. As with all of these services, we must log into the service's Web site to see and stream our activity. That is fine for the majority of us, but what about self-hosted lifestreaming? Solutions include Sweetcron and a ton of advanced PHP scripts that can be found at the lifestreamblog.The problem, however, is that a lot of these scripts are complicated, and if you do not have basic PHP coding skills, you are pretty much out of luck. This is where Kakuteru comes into play. Kakuteru is an open source lifestreaming application built on Ruby On Rails, with the key difference being that it uses your your FriendFeed.com stream as the core lifestream backend. It falls into the self-hosted lifestreaming category because you have the ability to mask your Kakuteru service URL to a domain name, as I did for testing purposes. It's completely customizable as well.Wait a second. This looks a lot like Sweetcron!Dominiek ter Heide, the creator of Kakuteru, got his inspiration and design from sweetcron, but that's where the similarities end. Sweetcron is completely self hosted, being you must install and upload the files to your Web server. Sweetcron also runs on PHP, and gives you the ability to import any type of activity stream via an RSS feed. Lastly, Sweetcron stores all of your content on your server.Kakuteru, on the other hand, is Web-based, and only aggregates your FriendFeed activity for your lifestream backend. In other words, you need a FriendFeed account for this to work properly. You have the ability to strictly post HTML content, if you decided not to aggregate any of your FriendFeed services. You also have the ability to toggle on and off the FriendFeed services you want to lifestream, so if you wanted your Kakuteru lifestream to strictly display Google Reader shares and Youtube videos, you would be able to do so.Okay, so what's so special about this?The ability to import your FriendFeed stream to a custom domain name with full customizationSemantic features such as autotagging of tweets and articles using Zemanta.comRelated articles & tweets are shown for each entry.Blog posts can be written and posted using textile, markdown or HTML.Kakuteru uses Disqus.com to support comments on articles & stream updates, and published articles have the ability to display Tweet-this, Digg and also Addthis.com, if you choose to enable these social components. "Me on other sites" are automatically gathered from your Friendfeed account.Oh, and did I mention it's open source?Out of the box:It's very vanilla out of the box, as you can see in the screenshot above, or by going to mikefruchter.com. Give your stream a custom feel and fit by customizing your CSS, headers and about page. Select the services you want to display, by default it will stream all of your FriendFeed services. Be sure to add your domain name and follow the instructions for pointing your dns to your Kakuteru account.Extra integration:Kakuteru allows you to seeminglessly incorporate Web 2.0 features and functions, such as your own custom Disqus forum, Feedburner feed, Dopplr schedule and social bookmarking services. No editing of code is necessary, it's a simple plug and play process.Activity stats:One of the features I particularly like is the activity stats. Kakuteru gives you two sets of stats. Daily activity, services used and hoURLy activity. Who doesn't love colorful bar graphs?Final verdict:I'm particularly not too big on self-hosted lifestreams, as I prefer the real deal with the community interaction behind it, i.e. FriendFeed. If I was looking for a custom solution, I would use this, but it's currently limited to only your FriendFeed data. If you are not on FriendFeed, this application will be of little use to you other than creating a bare-bones HTML blog post. I do like that it is semantically-driven and offers a ton of bells and whistles, and like Sweetcron, it's open source. This application showcases a lot of what Sweetcron is currently lacking, the creator has put some thought and time into it and it's obvious by looking at the feature set. Since the creator of this app took his que from Sweetcron, I would like to see this application be able to save your lifestreaming data to your server. Offer that, and you have a real winner on your hands.Kakuteru is currently in closed Beta, so be sure to register as a second round of invites will be going out soon.Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.More: louisgray.com | RSS | FriendFeed | E-mail | Cell: 408 646.2759