Though a few other lifestreaming sites such as Jaiku and 30 Boxes and services with lifestreaming such as 43 People came first, FriendFeed found its niche among the Google and ex-Google and A-list blogger crowds, and quickly became a hit. Sites such as Plaxo Pulse and MyBlogLog have followed on, but without such popularity. Similarly, Facebook can now feed personal streams from other popular sites into its Minifeed and added commentary there.

Plurk improves on Twitter, posting visually across a timeline. It improves support for links and media, threads conversations better, features channels for cliques and specific friends, and awards karma points in support of reputation ranking. The rich interface uses browsers better than text microblogs, features lost via text messaging.

Identi.ca improves on microblogging Twitter, using the Free Software Foundation Affero General Public Licensed and open framework Laconica. It operates over open protocols to give users autonomy and control. All posts license with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, rendering them open data.

Designed for the frequent traveler, Dopplr lets me share where i plan to go. Though it can share trips via Yahoo FireEagle, unlike Plazes and BrightKite, it dedicates itself to planned trips, not current location. It can use oAuth to discover friends on popular social networking sites without asking for passwords from those sites.

Plazes lets me share where i go. Simple desktop and mobile apps let me check-in and place myself automatically using network identifiers recorded into its databases. Plazes also lets me tag and mark when and where i plan to go and have already gone, and share with friends or the public and also via a Facebook app, iCalendar, and geopresence distributors such as http://FireEagle.yahoo.net.

Facebook became what others could have become, a rich platform and network for modular appliances—small focused applications. Facebook, however, adopts the walled garden approach, akin to Myspace, and works poorly with open architectures and protocols. Those not in verified college, workplace, and organization networks are limited to one regional geographical network.

Whether some stories truly need condensing editing to 1000 characters, or suffer it tolerably, Clipmarks can excerpt and share only that, though it allows another 1000 for commentary and numerous additional pictures, each worth maybe a thousand words. In addition to viral appeal in way of a Facebook app, the new Clipcast interface looks and works like a widget, perhaps to target mobile users. For this category, a thousand character summary of a page would then seem ideal! Linkmarking, indexed from terse to featureful, might go Reddit, Del.icio.us, Digg, Google, Yahoo, MyWeb, Clipmarks, Ma.gnolia, Faves (Blue Dot), Tumblr, and Google Reader Shared items.

A rich and expressive collaborative calendar now integrated with Yahoo for easier logins and also as a Facebook application, Upcoming reaches out to your friends to share events. It also automatically incorporates tagged photos from Flickr, and offers both Yahoo and Google custom roadmaps. For events already affixed in time and place, a collaborative calendar beats round robins of mail.