Lifestreaming Evolves with Storytlr
Straight out of Belgium comes a really interesting life streaming service, yes another one, but this one brings a few unique and much needed features to the market.
The service is called Storytlr (a play on story teller) and it allows members to create their own lifestreaming service at their own URL. It's similar to the recently launched services Swurl (our review) and Sweetcron, but Storytlr has a few really neat tricks up its sleeve.
After you've signed up you are requested to complete the now predictable yet painless connecting of your twitter, flickr, last.fm etc. accounts. So far so good.
One of the cool things that Storytlr surprises you with is that it allows you to manually insert your own content directly onto the site. This content can be a simple tweet-like message, a full blog post, an image or even an audio file. I love that Storytlr imports all Tweets but it automatically hides all @reply messages so they don't clutter up your lifestream and don't get published to the public unless you specifically request that the are.
The end result is essentially a blog, see mine here, where visitors can comment on your content the same way you would on any normal blog. Storytlr offers a number of widgets you can include or remove and four customizable themes.
And Now For Something Completely New
Storytlr brings something completely new to the lifestreaming game and this part is where it gets its name. We discovered the service in a post by Ernst-Jan Pfauth titled "No more standard lifestreams please, be creative!" This part is where Pfauth gets his wish. You'll notice a tab on your public profile where you can create "stories". You can think of "stories" as all the tweets, posts and media about a particular event compiled into one. A story is like a topical collection of items. To create a story is very straightforward, simply select the dates this "story" or event occurred and select which content you would like to have included. Storytlr puts all this together into a little slideshow showing all your selected tweets, videos and photographs. You can see an example of one by clicking the image below.
Storytlr really does bring something new to the lifestreaming fanatics out there and I plan to make the most out of it myself. There is still room for improvement and a few bugs to iron out. I would love to be able to customize the design of my Storytlr site entirely and I would also like to see my content added much faster (think Friendfeed fast). However, for a brand new app they've done a fantastic job with both concept and implementation.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
your link to storytlr is incorrect... goes to storylir instead
cheers
Wait, a new service adds grouping (calling it stories) and its an evolutionary leap?
That's it?
Cheers Ben - fixed.
@Joe, do you know of another service where you can share like you would on your own site, friends can comment like you would on your own blog, group sets of life moments together to create "stories" - all within a matter of minutes?
Please check your Storytlr url at the starting of the post as it is wrongly given. Pls change it :-)
---
Sampad
Thanks Ziad for this nice review ! I'm really happy to see that you enjoy our little twist at lifestreaming. What do you think of the backup feature ?
Let me also emphasize that we are not a startup, this is just a side project of two people and we launched only a few weeks ago. So, we still have a lot of work to do and many ideas. All feedback from the community is very much appreciated !!
@Zee If you really wanted to, you could do all this in Wordpress using plugins freely available. But I agree with you, that there is no one service that does it all like Storytlr. However, just the fact that they added stories isn't necessarily an evolution.
Hi Laurent, yeah I thought the backup feature was a great idea but just not obviously a full backup yet which is why I didn't give it a mention. Maybe i'll back track and put a comment in there about it.
And regarding not being a startup - that might need to change! :)
Oh hells no - Another activity stream standard? Come on, we will never get any kind of adoption for owning own data if everyone ignores the standard that already exists and makes their own.
Didn't Magnolia just publish their spec like last month? Why wasn't that used for Storytlr? If they wanted to add or change something they could have just asked Chris Messina couldn't they?
anti-social behavior amongst social media developers = fail!
Hi Todd ! Thanks for this great question ! I guess you are referring to the DiSo project ? (http://diso-project.org/).
Well... the good news is that we havn't published an API yet. So, we don't introduce yet a new standard ! If you refer to the backup, no worries, this is a very rough initial prototype, think of it as an RSS turned into a CSV file. This is one thing that will definitively change soon.
At this stage we just try to test the core of our user proposition (import/mashup/export) and to decide where to focus our efforts. But yes, microformats, open id, and an api (using oauth?, xmpp?, DiSo?) are also on our minds.
Don't hesitate to share more thoughts with us, here, on twitter, or by e-mail !
I like this. The look and feel is very clean and I especially appreciate the "scrapbooking" piece - knitting all your various ephemera into cohesive "stories" does seem evolutionary (or at least nice) when compared to a typical aggregator. One problem with RSS though - it seems to think that my blog was written in 1970. Kind of odd, maybe a feedburner issue?
Sweetcron FTW! - if your a web designer/developer your gonna love the control you get over your all aspects of your lifestreaming platform.
This is creative & smooth, might soon become popular in other lifestream apps.
I just set up my first storytlr.com lifestream:
http://springnet.storytlr.com/story/view/id/135/page/0
It was easy, and the result was impressive!
Got mine too! http://magnoliasouth.storytlr.com/
The only thing is that they need more 2.0 lifestreams. I was surprised that Stumble Upon wasn't on the list. They have Digg, why not SU?