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.

Plaxo began as online address book and then calendar exchange, a way to maintain updates by letting users maintain their own profile and chose with whom they share it. This year Plaxo began offering lifestreaming, Pulse, aggregating comments from friends and affinity groups. It also maintains detailed profiles with distinct views for personal and professional lives, and shares them only within categories of contacts.

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.

Run by a Finnish company in accord with European privacy law and standards, but now bought by Google, Jaiku streams feeds for friends and others to discover and read and also channel into SMS alerts. It also imbues this capability for groups.

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.

An amazingly expressive collaborative calendar, in Eventful events can include sub-events and related events in sophisticated relationships. It distinguishes between calendars and groups—which have members and discussions. It also supports microformats, syndication, to feed calendars, feed readers, other applications and browsers.

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.

Oriented towards news and journalism, Newsvine features originals stories and linkmarks to stories. As a cofounder with Wired Magazine and the New York University School of Journalism, it also participates in Assignment Zero, a crowdsourced journalism experiment.

Unlike other photo-sharing sites, Tabblo lets photographers juxtapose pictures and express elegant graphic visions in complex tableaus. This supports story telling better, while also keeping photos in full resolution for printing. I share the majority of mine here only with subjects and friends.

An advanced photo sharing service supporting only Open ID logins, Zooomr features photostreams, favorites, portals, geocoding, and smart sets, and offers unlimited uploads in a flexible variety of formats. Still in beta, as Zooomr unviels Mark III, i will probably shift my intended use for it to host stock collections.

An amazingly full-featured and flexible photo sharing site, Flickr has become the buzz for photography on the Web. It boasts one of the most interesting collaborative filters for photography, http://flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ —be sure to see it. My stream includes selected works linking elsewhere.

Like Wikipedia, the Rochester wiki invites everyone to contribute. It has quickly become one of Rochester's top sites, though not without adverse effects. Trolls abound. Editors have no clue about libel. Egotism run rampant—so much against the grain of wikis. My page tallies my edits and contributions.

A most powerful and flexible linkmarking platform, and unlike others, Faves (formerly Blue Dot) requires no registration. For minimal functionality, it saves user identity in a browser cookie and invitation identities in a coded link sent via mail, so recipients need not register to reply. The coded link also establishes a friend relationship with the recipient, should they also join. In addition, members can group friends, and share specific links only with those groups. It feeds my Tribe and Gaia summaries and other tumblelogs, and marks items i feel worthy of my readers.

Digg began ostensibly as alternative to Slashdot. Its founders found Slashdot too closed, dominated by articles an elite group of editors found interesting. Though Digg used algorithms and not a cabal of anointed editors, many users complained a defacto cabal of frequent users did dominate the front page. In response, January 2008 Digg modified their algorithm to select for diversity and independence. Though it may in effect be more fair, i find it dominated by pubescent boys and articles they find interesting. Though i use it, i prefer Ma.gnolia, Faves, Reddit, and other recommenders.

A social and collaborative linkmark sharing site, Del.icio.us features a rich Web programming interface and desktop applications, such as Cocoalicious, and informative graphic design. Though Del.icio.us may be social, it also lacks features useful for communications. It limits notes to a few hundred characters, cannot capture images, cannot generate mail nor invitations for non-members to specific links, does not support Open ID nor discussions. Since Del.icio.us published an add-on extension for Firefox, in place of Firefox Bookmarks as the main linkmarking service, i keep Del.icio.us marks mainly for my own use, and to share between Firefox and Flock. Though not a top priority, i also share for friends and readers, and rarely lock down my links. For sharing links, i prefer more feature-rich services, tagged “linkmarks” here.

Many species call out to each other from safe perches above the veld. Humans have too, until they moved too afar. Twitter now lets them call out through the forest via text messages. Do you sense a disturbance in your view of the world?