LifeinLines and LifeBlob - timeline for your lifestreaming
LifeinLines is a new app to record and share your life with others, aka your lifestream. Capture your thoughts, memories, observations, reactions - almost anything that you want, anytime, using any media.
As founder Ankur puts it -
It’s like an ongoing autobiography- a medley of text, images, videos and voice that you can maintain rather easily.
You can post updates via web, email, SMS, GTalk or even your phone. You can also set per item level privacy and share updates with your friends or make them public. The UI is pretty cool but I could not find user level RSS feeds that you can subscribe to.
Lifeblob is a Bangalore based service that competes directly with LifeinLines. In terms of the UI and features, Lifeblob appears to be more compelling and complete. The timeline UI is not only more intuitive, but you can also import photos from other photo sharing sites and import your existing blog into the site as well. Privacy settings allow your updates to be private or visible to the public or your friends only. Other interesting features like collaborative editing of a ‘lifeblob’ also seem to be in the works.
While both are pretty neat services, personally I dont see any compelling reason to enroll for yet another aggregation service. Probably its just me, but I’m suffering from an overload already.
June 24th, 2008 at 6:02 am
Pranav,
Thanks for your coverage of Lifeblob. While the post provides a good summary of Lifeblob, there are a few myths that I have tried to dispel in the blog post below:
http://blog.lifeblob.com/2008/06/24/lifeblob-covered-in-startup-dunia/
Would love to hear your comments.
Regards,
Pranav
June 25th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
@pranav
thanks for the clarification.
the reason why I called lifeblob as an aggregation service is because of the importers for photo and blogs. So, if these features are only to jumpstart the user’s profile, does a user have to manually upload photos to lifeblob later ? Or will lifeblob sync automatically with photos I upload to my existing account at flickr / picasa ?
Same about a blog - would updates to my blog get synced or will I have to put manual updates to lifeblob ?
thnx.
July 1st, 2008 at 2:27 am
Pranav@startupdunia
,
Sorry for the late response. Currently we import the data only once. We will be enabling auto-syncing of data in the coming release.
So one use case could be that, you upload your birthday event photos/videos on Flickr/Picasa/Youtube. We would sync it up and then you can quickly add people who had attended your birthday event, some tags and place where it happened. So this event would appear on all their timelines ( so no more sharing links to various event to your friends who were part of it ). Everything that happened in your life, would appear automatically on your timeline ( and thereby collaboratively building your timeline ).
Rakesh
Lifeblob
July 1st, 2008 at 11:22 pm
@Rakesh,
auto-syncing makes so much more sense. because I wouldnt want to upload photos and then use lifeblob to like point to those photos. if thats the case, what value would i get from using lifeblob.
thanks,
-p
July 5th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Excellent question. Let me answer by taking a simple example:
Suppose you go to a trip with couple of your friends and then later come back and upload all the pics to Picasa. Now, the best you can do is to start sharing links with all your friends. ( Imagine what happens when there are lot of such events happening, every one will end up with lot of links to access data of various events). Now, supposing you use Lifeblob, we would sync that event ( with photos/videos etc) and then you can quickly add people who were part of that event, place where it happened and some tags. So that event would not only become part of your timeline, but also be a part of all the participant’s timelines, the place’s timeline and timelines of the tags. So everything that happened in your life would be right on your timeline ( which is built by events created by you or by events that someone else created that you were part of).
Let me know if this explains the value prop of using Lifeblob.
PS: Adding support for comment notifications on your blog would be a great addition!
July 7th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
@rakesh - that does offer some value considering that my friends are on lifeblob too. Somehow, this feature wasnt easily obvious to me.