ReadWriteWeb

There are moments in life when the universe decides to play a cruel joke on you and just as your company's files are being transfered to a new data center, a truck driver rams into a power transformer and cuts power to the server rack that is meant to be receiving your precious files. And after that, your other back up gets wiped off its server by an over-zealous system administrator. And then after that, you're helping your CEO write an apologetic message to members. That "hypothetical" story is meant to illustrate the point that backup in multiple locations (via cloud or otherwise) is important.

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.

StoryTlr, a lifestreaming service that debuted to a lot of positive press last year, has (among several other enhancements) debuted a major new feature today: Pages. This is a new gallery format view of selected portions of a total lifestream, essentially as a slideshow. StoryTlr adds this new ability to its already rich aggregation support of different social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, RSS feeds and Digg. Also updated is support for tags and a new theme.

Momentile is a new photo sharing service with some very cool twists. There is, of course, no dearth of photo sharing services online, but momentile has come up with an interesting way to combine photo sharing and lifestreaming with the spirit of micro-blogging services like Twitter. The basic idea behind momentile is that you will upload one picture per day, so that after a year, you will have a collection of 365 pictures that represent that year. Momentile is still in private alpha testing, but we do have a few invites to give away. Instructions for how to get them are at the bottom of this post.

Chi.mp, the "online identity aggregator" that not only gives you a place to aggregate your updates but also gives you a free .mp domain name, just received a major makeover. Chi.mp now allows you to publish your own blog posts and photos on the site. In addition, Chi.mp now lets you customize your site with custom themes and it has gained the ability to push status updates to both Twitter and Facebook.

Recently, Facebook added a new feature to its News Feeds: a "like" button. Now, rather than leaving a throw-away or otherwise unnecessary comment on a friend's status update, you can show your appreciation by just clicking "like" instead. Sound familiar? If not, then it's clear you haven't tried FriendFeed FriendFeed, the social web aggregation service popular among early adopters.

As avid users of FriendFeed will tell you, Facebook's implementation of FriendFeed's features are nothing but a pale imitation of the real thing. Still, there's a growing concern among the service's fans about its sustainability. Although FriendFeed's founders believe they can still innovate to profitability, we're no longer sure that's true.

Noovo is a full-on lifestreaming / blogging / bookmarking / everything (except social network) app that launched out of private beta last week. It calls itself a "social discovery engine"; and recommendations technology is part of the overall package. The company Noovo is based in Slovenia, has been around for a long time and counts Esther Dyson amongst its investors. It took us a while to grok the service, but essentially Noovo is a content sharing application similar to Tumblr - but a lot more full-featured. In particular, as well as enabling you to aggregate and add content - as Tumblr does - Noovo lets you discover new content via automated recommendations.