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.

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.

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.

Designed for installation on blogs, Disqus becomes the comment system. It organizes comments around not only the blog, but also the comment and commentary, almost akin to lifestreaming services such as Jaiku and FriendFeed. Unlike lifestreams with comments, Disqus doesn't fracture the commentary; it is the commentary—the one designated by the author.

Unlike most lifestreaming services, LinkRiver not only aggregates my feeds for resyndication, but also aggregates all those i follow here. This yields a link view of items i find or might find of import.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Outtakes, events, inline skating, friends, photos, videos, links, blog and Buzz

…plus sojourners and villains. I had originally registered with LiveJournal to comment on friends blogs and to post in the Rochester community. Of course, it remains an informative and venerated site.

By the folks at Six Apart, creator of Movable Type, TypePad, and LiveJournal, Vox emphasizes visual design and graphity. Though Vox hosts photos, albums, and collections, it can also import photos from other services in complement. (described by TechCrunch)

Formerly Zaadz, Gaia combines intentional community, social and green enterprise, and conscious capitalism to foster a spirituality and vibe that encourages and enables its members to act and accomplish. Groups embrace ancient concepts, from organic farming and community to spirituality and literacy, and modern concepts, from sustainability and nutrition to social capital theory and economics. It links Amazon items and features a business directory.