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.

Unlike most linkmarking and social media sites, to bar spam at Mahalo, humans read and approve every link and story submission.

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.

A commented and tagged linksblog with reference counting, Shared Stuff also shares my Google Reader profile. Like Faves, it can also share via e mail, though of course, responding requires a Google login.

As typical for Google now, online web applications they build rise quickly to become category killers. Though NetNewWire and FeedDemon, both from Newsgator, still work better, can work together, and claim top industry awards, Google Reader beats all other online feed readers. Tagging and sharing what i read into lifestreams such as FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse, 43 People, Jaiku, Tumblr, 30 Boxes, even for resyndicating into Facebook, Tribe, and other social networking sites has never been easier.

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.

A tumble log of ideas, inventions, and information on social enterprise, social capital, social computing, social media, collaborative filtering, calendaring, folksonomies, linkmarking, journalism, computer supported collaborative work, software and development, programming, photography, and other observations. The Tumblr tunbleblogging platform now powers Ideavine.

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 multiformat document repository and archive with referral tracking and public, open logging, Scribd embeds a FlashPaper reader to display documents of many types right in the browser. It also includes social networking and collaborative story ranking.

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.