Each Facebook Timeline profile now has a tiny clock icon in the status window update, allowing you to place items on your wall in the past. This is a pretty significant Facebook update considering that, initially, Timeline defaulted to publishing posts in the present only. Now the decision to travel back in time is yours. This new feature mimics a blog platform's publish date option - except on Timeline, you can only pick the date, whereas on a blog platform, you can pick both the date and time.
With this new Timestamp update, along with everything Timeline-related, Facebook is hoping you will share more on its platform. We're edging closer and closer toward real-live lifestreaming. Timestamping new posts with an old date not only brings you closer to your Facebook past, it also encourages you to differentiate less between your offline and online lives. Timeline urges you to share more personal content, and make that content more social than it was on your old Facebook profile. Like everything Timeline-related, this update is only available to those who have used the Facebook Developer Timeline workaround. See the Timestamp update after the jump.
3 key points you need to know about Facebook Timeline, gleaned from two previous "lifestreaming" products: FriendFeed and Memolane.
Facebook's new Timeline, currently in a limited developer release but set to be unveiled to its hundreds of millions of users any day now, is going to shake up the social networking landscape. It's going to bring lifestreaming - formally a geeky activity based around RSS feeds - to the mainstream. In my view, Timeline is the smartest and most significant thing Facebook has done since launching a developer platform in May 2007. I think it's that important.
So where did the inspiration for Timeline come from and why is it going to be such a big deal? We can see the future just by looking at two earlier lifestreaming products: FriendFeed and scrappy start Memolane.
Clicking the "Like" button is incredibly easy to do, and increasingly becoming the primary way people interact on Facebook.
Users are engaging with Facebook pages 31% more over the last year. Of this boost in engagement, 84% turned out to be from the "Like" button, while 15% were from comments and only 1% were from shares, according to a recent report from Efficient Frontier. Take a look at a chart from their report after the jump.
Improved mobile phone cameras and the ability to live stream anything from a phone has proved threatening to police who don't like to be filmed, but an app used by the University of Maryland police department could be the future of 9-1-1.
The University of Maryland police department is testing an app that will allow police to monitor live video of an emergency situation and will allow a mobile user to beam video to the police station in a time of need.
Courts in the United States are not just about high profile litigation and murder cases. Most of the grunt work of the U.S. legal system is done in district courts and chances are you have probably been there contesting speeding tickets or for some other menial rite of legal malaise. Yet, what you do not know about the legal process could hurt you the day you show up and are not prepared.
OpenCourt is a project by WBUR, the Boston University affiliate of National Public Radio, funded by the Knight Foundation to increase knowledge and interaction of the legal process by placing a streaming cameras in courtrooms. A couple of MacBooks Pros, a Canon HD camcorder and Livestream and you have your very own reality television.
Mozilla Labs has launched a new "lifestream" platform called sudoSocial. Pulling its name from the Linux command "sudo" which allows users to run programs with other, usually elevated privileges, the sudoSocial publishing platform aims to give you both access and control over your many online identities.
Although sudoSocial would be suitable for curating any stream of content, explains the introductory blog post, in its early, still rather sparse format, it's better for personal homepages that aggregate your various feeds, like Flickr photos and blog posts, for example.
Maybe we're getting to be a bit of a broken record on this point, but a blog post this morning by Robert Scoble on how malleable social graphs could change the direction of location based services reminded us of the fine line we think we're all walking.
Malleable social graphs, much like recommendation engines and customized searches, sound like the wave of the future, but we fear that they will, if improperly used, ensure that we never hear a disagreeable opinion or see something outside of our day-to-day ever again.
Location-based social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Google Buzz are currently among the fastest growing new mobile services. All of these apps have one thing in common: they encourage you to share your current location with the rest of the world. By doing this, though, you are also telling people where you are not: at home. A new site, PleaseRobMe, plays on this theme and displays real-time updates from Foursquare users who broadcast their check-ins on Twitter.
Social media aggregator Cliqset today announced a new beta version of its platform that aggregates activity feeds from 70 different social media sites, transforms them into normalized Activity Streams standard data and then pushes them out in real time.
The company's offers multiple ways to access the data through its API but also hopes that more users will stick with its own, now much improved, user interface. The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers to click this link will gain access to the new beta version of the site.
In wake of the news of the FriendFeed acquisition by Facebook, we're faced with the real possibility that FriendFeed.com will be shut down for good. According to the press release, "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being..." In other words, it's only a matter of time before the site is gone for good. What is the FriendFeed community to do?
At one time, FriendFeed clones like Lifestream.fm and Socialthing! looked like promising alternatives, but neither of them offered the same rich and innovative features that FriendFeed does - the very features which made FriendFeed the standout service that it is today. However, there is one service that may have an opportunity to capitalize on the FriendFeed exodus: social media aggregator Streamy.
