AmpliFeeder: FriendFeed's Much Hotter Sister
There are a slew of social media aggregation sites willing, waiting, and wanting to pull your updates, videos, photos, links, music, "shares," "likes," and other content from all around the web. A few of them work well, some have really cool features, and others have critical mass.
But none of them are as drop-dead good-looking - or as customizable - as AmpliFeeder, a free, open-source distributed social activity aggregator. The only major drawback: It's the kind of web app that needs to be installed on a server. But a hosted version is in the works, and the screen shots prove it's so worth the effort.
AmpliFeeder aggregates items from Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Google Shared Items, Tumblr, Digg, Reddit, LastFM, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Upcoming, Mixx, BrightKite, and more. It can also handle any RSS feeds you throw at it.
Perhaps best of all, it'll automagically import any of the services you link to through FriendFeed, making your new site setup time about 30 seconds:
Creator Jon Paul Davies has uploaded several other interesting and useful videos on using AmpliFeeder.
Certainly, the best features of the product for the end user are its slew of gorgeous interfaces. The themes differ not just in color/fonts/ridiculous design doodads; they mix up the information design itself.
For example, if the user prefers straight-up streams of data, there are several sexy options such as this:
For those who like their data with a little more segregation between services, there are themes such as these:
And then, a couple themes go all-out on the visualization:
Best of all, there's a custom CSS function that graphic designer-type users can use to style themes to their hearts' content.
Anyone can comment on posted content as comments "live" on the AmpliFeeder site. Items can be hidden or deleted. On the back end, a graph report shows what percentage of content comes from which services. AmpliFeeder also has its own microblog function; posts appear on the AmpliFeeder page and are pushed to the linked services. And AmpliFeeder can also generate a nice, data-portable XML file for users to backup all their social stream's data; XML files can also be used to restore data.
Burton Group analyst Mike Gotta wrote back in the mists of time (May 2007), "The term [lifestream] actually goes back to at least 1997, when Eric Freeman and David Gelernter saw it "as a network-centric replacement for the desktop metaphor. As their project page (last updated in 2000) at Yale put it: 'A lifestream is a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream.'"
Since then, lifestreaming has become the must-have method for communicating with one's public. Look at Modernista; look at Skittles. Better yet, look at what independent designers and other creatives are doing with the medium. And all this time, aside from complicated and costly proprietary solutions, most lifestreaming sites have displayed unbearably ugly UIs.
Kudos to Davies for making a functional lifestream aggregator that looks like a real website. In fact, we imagine that since the current state of the web has given rise to more and more personal and enterprise/corporate sites of the lifestreaming persuasion, Davies' creation comes at a perfect time for designers and webmasters alike.
UPDATE: For our super-smart commenters, here's what we wrote last year about Sweetcron. Yup, I'm new here.
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I was ready to give this a go, but then realized that it's built on ASP/IIS/MSSQL, which I lack right now. Figured it's important to mention that requirement.
Hmmm, themed aggregation, sexy indeed. I really like the blue theme.
Depending on the CSS and layout options, this could replace desktop Twitter clients. We can just build our own.
This is thinking outside the box at it's finest. Kudos to the creators!
Justyn
Ohhh, yeah - they should have built it on the LAMP stack, or at least build a version for it. Will be interested in seeing the hosted version...
Love how the url reads "frienfeeds much prettier sister" and the article headline screams "...friendfeeds much HOTTER sister"
@Amit - Yes, thanks for bringing this up!
@Paul - Hah, yeah, I forgot to re-edit the URL after I changed the headline. What can I say; I want those pageviews. ;)
I don't see this as similar to friendfeed as much as it is a way to aggregate and archive activity on one's own server. I like that idea. I'd like everything aggregated and archived on my blog server.
Posted by: Karoli
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May 25, 2009 9:25 PM
I was looking at this and kept thinking of a world where the creator of SweetCron [1] had met the guys from BizSpark [2] and released a project after that meeting. This is very pretty stuff. My primary objection to SweetCron even though it was a LAMP approach, was the requirement (at the time?) for PHP5 which I didn't want to put on any of my hosts -- real, virtual, or otherwise.
In the end, any hosted version of this will be popular and doubly so if they include a Tumblr like feature to point your own vanity domain to it [3].
[1] http://www.sweetcron.com/
[2] http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/
[3] http://qthrul.com
If you're looking to host your lifestream and want something that you can stick on the LAMP stack, try SweetCron.
http://sweetcron.com
Hey good stuff, I've been using friendfeed but getting sick of not being about to personalize
@Jay & J.J.
YES, I wanted to look at SweetCron, too. Just emailed someone about that, actually. I heard about/saw it around SxSW and was very impressed with the implementation at http://yongfook.com. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability right now to test any server-side apps; I was able to look at Amplifeeder because the creator, Jon, set up a login and everything for me.
Hopefully, SweetCron will be available as a hosted solution soon! I'd love to do a comparison.
FriendFeed's Much Hotter Sister?!
whenever an entrepreneur trying to take on a generic technical challenge, I give him/her a thumb up for having the gut to dedicate time/energy without clear business model, with loads of competitions.
This app is going to be very useful for those who are social network junkies. I hope it can open a channel for ease of use as of now it won't be easy for end users to have to install things up first.
ASP and IIS are on any Windows XP machine so no problem there. You can download a free version of SQL too.
Do you know if you can run this on these specs? Sorry, it is too late for me to download and test something. Actually I am just too lazy at the moment to read their site :)
My first thought is that Friendfeed is just becoming great. And I think I will try to focus my time on them, but I do like to try out new things...
An AGPL licensed aggregator for FriendFeed style lifestreaming is great news... Until you realize that it requires IIS, ASP, MSSQL and a host of other Microsoft-only proprietary technologies. Quite surprising...
In two or three years of following rww & TC et al, this is the first asp.net blogging/lifestreaming open source tool I've read about. Interested to see how this fares against LAMP offerings - but obviously there's lots of asp.net devs out there, perhaps Amplifeeder can build on an under-served market.
It being ASP based already makes it way easier to set up even for free than sweetcron ever was or will be. you can use web platform installer in a free host and i am sure even Windows Azure with some tweaking if you got access. it is pretty much a mix of sweetcron with lifestream.fm. the friendfeed connection is merely a marketing and buzz one since it just imports your registered accounts so you don't have to fill them out..
i do think they should go for a bizspark deal given their stack and because that would allow them to build a Windows Azure base where you could simply sign for a AmpliFeeder site in the same way you sign for a Windows Live account.
worth taking a look at it.
just to clarify on why it is easier to set this up than sweetcron before someone screams at me. that is because of web platform installer that pretty much can do most of the work and because of the amplifeeder set up that also does most of the rest of the once the basic requirements/pre-requisites are in place. so i am not implying it is better. in tech terms they are pretty much the same concepts and basis. it is just that this one is better packaged to consume.
@neil:
if you had not heard or read about asp.net open source blog or CMS engines then is because you didn't looked in Codeplex or Microsoft.com/web since there are like a twenty of them.
Ha! This just gets cooler and cooler. The themes are named after Joy Division songs!!!
triggering applications and multimedia content on your computer. It works via RFID stamps, known as "ztamp:s" in the company's years old
The fact that it's not LAMP-based really kills it for me. Too bad as I'm definitely looking for a self-hosted lifestream solution.
What a useful post. It's awesome!
For what it's worth, the creator of AmpliFeeder has stated that he is working on a LAMP stack version. Should be available fairly soon. He said most of this was written in JS so it'll be easy to convert it over to LAMP.
Posted by: xxdesmus.myopenid.com
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May 26, 2009 11:09 AM
No sister can be hotter than you, Jolie.
Glad to hear that the LAMP stack version is in the works. Like others posted, this killed it for me. Self-hosted is great, so I look forward to hearing of the new developments.
Definitely a very sexy lifestreaming solution, but part of the joy of FriendFeed is the community and the interaction, which you lose with this.
Wake me up when its LAMP.