creative briefing

Recently, the idea of lifestreaming has become more and more relevant to the everyday internet user. The fact of the matter is, we’re increasingly becoming more and more involved in various social activities around the web – we tweet on Twitter, we upload videos to YouTube, we post photos to Flickr, we review sites with StumbleUpon, we share sites with Digg, we bookmark links on Delicious – and the list goes on and on. The problem is, all of these activities occur on different sites spread out across the internet.

Enter: lifestreaming – the notion of aggregating all your activites into one place and streaming it to your friends and other creepers alike. Sort of like your Facebook minifeed, but for your entire [internet] life.

There are a handful of services that have already spawned to support this idea of lifestreaming (FriendFeed comes to mind as one of the more popular ones). However, none of these services have ever offered a self-hosted platform that allowed users to customize and own their data (à la WordPress) – until recently, that is. Introducing Sweetcron!

According to its website, Sweetcron is “the Automated Lifestream Blog Software” created by Tokyo-based developer Yongfook. According to me, it’s the WordPress of lifestreaming. Built on the open-source framework Code Igniter, Sweetcron uses a similar theme and plugin architecture that made us fall in love with WordPress. This gives us, the internetz people, the freedom and flexibility to style and customize our lifestreams in any way we want to – either by designing and developing our own themes, or by sourcing one of the free themes that have already been offered by some early-adopters.

How it works

A lifestream on Sweetcron is powered by RSS feeds that are entered into the backend control panel. That’s it! You simply enter in your feeds from each of the social communities you’re a part of and Sweetcron takes care of the rest. Pretty sweet, right?

Themes

By default, an installation of Sweetcron comes with a Sandbox (basic) theme (below, left) and Boxy But Good (below, right), a more stylish theme that was made popular by its creator and original user. However, adding themes is as easy as customizing a few template files and dumping it all into a theme folder.

Plugins

Plugins for Sweetcron are created to help the system interpret incoming feed data and extract information like pictures, videos, headings, and tags for display. In its most basic installation, Sweetcron comes with a few pre-installed plugins for sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo, but it seems to be smart enough in most cases to handle feeds from other sites.

Write

For those times when you need to speak your mind, Sweetcron offers a very basic Write function that powers a blog. It pales in comparison to WordPress’ write function but keep in mind blogging is not positioned as a primary activity for Sweetcron users. For the casual blogger, this Write function serves as a less intimidating replacement for a dedicated blog platform.

Why Sweetcron

In a presentation, Sweetcron creator Yongfook explains that teh blog ar dead (internet speak for the blog is dead). He explains that our stories is being told less and less in the form of blog posts, and more and more in the form of activities we perform around the web. For those who can relate to this evolution, Sweetcron may be just for you!

Here are some other reasons to use Sweetcron (or any lifestreaming software for that matter):

• All of your social profiles and activities aggregated in one place
• People who normally only follow one of your social profiles are exposed to other related ones
• Your website is always up to date without needing you to do anything
• Flexible theme architecture that lets you customize the way you display your lifestream
• You can stream pretty much anything that has a RSS feed

Why Not Sweetcron

Sweetcron and lifestreaming isn’t for everyone. Here are a couple of reasons why Sweetcron/lifestreaming isn’t going to work for you:

• TMI (Too Much Information): if you’re very active in a number of different communities, your followers just might be overwhelmed by the vast amount of activities happening on your Sweetcron-powered website
• The nature of interaction on some communities will naturally drown out others; most people upload photos in large batches to Flickr, which means your entire front page could be flooded with your latest photos, drowning out your other activities
• If you’re more than just a casual blogger, don’t expect any basic Sweetcron themes to give your posts the attention they deserve – all your new tweets, photos, diggs and stumbles will push your blog posts off the front page of your website in no time

But… teh blog ar not dead!

There seems to be a big disconnect between bloggers and Sweetcron/lifestreaming. Bloggers are probably among the most active participants in social communities on the web. So why can’t there be a way for bloggers to take advantage of all the cool things Sweetcron does while still keeping their blog posts front and center?

I kept this in mind when I set out to develop a custom theme for my good friend Satish and what I came up with was something we now label as teh blog ar not dead – a custom Sweetcron theme that “keeps your blog posts front and center so that they don’t get drowned out by your other geeky internet activities”. You can check out the theme in action over at sati.sh (while you’re there, embrace the awesomeness of the domain).

I’ve been planning on releasing the theme for free for some time now, and technically all the pieces are in place for me to do so. However, work has gotten the best of me so I haven’t gotten around to connecting the last bits. I posted the idea on a Sweetcron discussion group and there seems to be some interest from users so I’m hoping to get it live soon. Thanks to all those who have already contacted me, I assure you it will be available… soon… I hope!

Learn more about Sweetcron

Sweetcron is still currently in public beta and you can request a download of it by visiting its website at sweetcron.com. You should receive an email with a download link as well as information on how to particpate in the usergroups and discussion forums.

What are your thoughts on Sweetcron and lifestreaming?

I attended WordCamp Toronto recently and had a chance to pick Matt Mullenweg‘s brain on lifestreaming, who suggested that integrating feeds from Flickr, Twitter and other social profiles may be part of the natural evolution of WordPress.

What do you think? Would lifestreaming work for you? Have you tried Sweetcron? If so, where do you think it hits and misses?

Being an open source platform, Sweetcron’s development is heavily dependent on the community that uses and pushes it. It’s still very much in its infancy and has the potential to go much further. I’m just looking forward to seeing how it’ll grow and whether it can truly live up to its title as the WordPress of lifestreaming.