Why backup your email? from BackupMy. Net on Vimeo.

BackupMy.Net is a service that allows individuals to back up their tweets, email accounts, blogs and photos. Rather than having to install or configure files for backup, the Austin-based service offers users the chance to store their online data in the cloud. As illustrated by their above email service video, Backupmy.Net may be invaluable in protecting users from accidental deletions, service suspension and outages. While RWW would never suggest you store your passwords in your emails, there is some merit to the service. The blogging and email backup service is particularly useful when you're working with clients who are less than tech-savvy and prone to deleting their files. Similar cloud-based services include Lifestream Backup, Mozy and Memopal.

As for the Twitter back up service, BackupMyTweets is fast to index files and offers users the chance to download their backed up tweets in HTML, JSON or XML format. Nevertheless, one of our biggest complaints with this service is that it auto-tweets a message to your friends upon joining. Love it or leave it, at least Spymaster offers you in-game points to pimp its service to your friends. If BackupMyTweets allowed users to choose to tweet about the service in exchange for discounts on premium offers, the Twitter message might not feel like such an intrusion. Once they overcome the automated Twitter spam issue, the service as a whole will likely prove a useful tool for those looking to store 3rd party hosted materials.

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.

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.

We spent entirely too much time creating our own StoryTlr site (which you can see here) and, while the back-end is more traditional and lacking slick JavaScript-style drag-and-drop features, the UI is very solid and access to customization easy and rewarding. Both what shows up on any of the tabs you create and the overall site look and feel can be tweaked. And if you already have a blog and just want to add a lifestream page, they have you covered there as well with a number of free widgets you can use.

Finally, you can in fact use StoryTlr as your blog too. Although the blog tools are not as robust as, say, WordPress, StoryTlr supports short-form and long-form entries with attached pictures and other media. It supports creating a tab that links to a non-RSS-based standard web page as well. So you can actually prioritize the lifestream over the blog, which may be a plus if you are setting up a vanity domain where you want to make a priority of showing activity over blog posts.

One Photo per Day

As you would expect, you can upload your photos directly to the service, or you can send them to a personalized momentile email address. Whenever you upload a new photo, you can add a short message that will then be sent out to your followers (momentile calls them 'stalkers') by SMS, Twitter, or email. However, momentile stresses that this is only meant to inform your followers about a new photo upload and should not be confused with tagging or adding a caption to a photo. Indeed, you can't add captions to a photo yourself - only your followers can add these.

You can upload more than one picture per day, by the way, but momentile enforces its one-picture-per-day rule and will automatically discard the older picture. Every day, you have until midnight to update your picture. That constraint, of course, is the focus of the service and it does make you think twice about which picture you want to choose to represent a given day.

Not a Social Network

Momentile insists that it is not a social network, but it does have a number of social features like following other users or saving other users' photos in your own 'stash.'

365

In a way, momentile codifies the 365 meme that is pretty popular on Flickr right now into one coherent app, with a focus on the mobile aspects of sharing and taking these pictures.

Overall, momentile looks like a fun and interesting app. It does have some minor usability problems, but the core idea behind the service is pretty cool. A few weeks ago, the cool kid on the blog was Plinky, a web app that asked you a different question every day. In some ways, momentile is a logical extension of that idea and it will be interesting to see how momentile's users decide to utilize the service in the long run.

Invites

Momentile is still in private alpha testing, but we have ten invites to give away for now - just send an email to 'momentile AT frederic.otherinbox.com' and we will get one to you ASAP.

One of the central features of Chi.mp is that it lets you to assume different personas (public, work, friends). With the current update, Chi.mp, for example, gives you the option publish new blog posts and albums that are either public, or only visible to your work contacts or friends. The new blog editor is basic, but it does the trick. Chi.mp, however, can't yet replace other minimalist blogging services like Tumblr or Posterous.

You can now also set a different theme for each of your personas. Chi.mp gives you 15 default themes and you can also upload your own backgrounds to the service.

The new photo album feature is a bit of a disappointment, however, as it can only handle relatively small images. We couldn't find any exact information about the limits that Chi.mp is enforcing here, but we weren't able to upload any images bigger than two megabytes.

Send Updates to Twitter and Facebook

Maybe the most important update is that Chi.mp can now push status updates to Twitter and Facebook. We assume Chi.mp is using Facebook's new API for publishing these updates.

It's Getting There

With these updates, Chi.mp is inching closer to fulfilling its promise of delivering a centralized hub for your online personas and life-stream.

Until now, we mostly used Chi.mp as an OpenID provider, but thanks to these updates, we will probably start to use it for the rest of its functions as well.

Sadly, Chi.mp is is still invite-only and we haven't heard anything about when it will come out of beta. We have had a grand total of three invites left at this point. Just send an email to chimp AT frederic.otherinbox.com if you want one.

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.

FriendFeed is a web application that's very much like Facebook's News Feed, except that it incorporates far more services. Where Facebook lets you import content to your News Feed from a dozen social web services that range from YouTube to Flickr, FriendFeed offers nearly sixty..including Facebook status updates. That's not the only difference, either. In FriendFeed, commenting on and "liking" items causes them to "bubble up" to the top - that is, it brings popular content up to the top of the page. FriendFeed's "FOAF" (friend-of-a-friend) feature also integrates posts from your friends' friends into your activity stream which can expose you to more interesting people who you might want to follow.

Although on the surface, FriendFeed might appear to be just a more robust version of the Facebook News Feed - a News Feed on steroids - the differences between the two go far beyond a list of features. Where Facebook users track their real-life friends' activities, FriendFeeders tend to track news and topics they're interested in. Most have probably never even met half the people they're subscribed to - they just like what they have to say and the things they share.

Wait...Doesn't FriendFeed Need to Make Money?

What FriendFeed delivers is something that's more than just the sum of its parts. It doesn't have one single killer feature that defines it. It is simply a mashup of pure innovation. So what if Facebook rips off bits and pieces of FriendFeed's better qualities? Why shouldn't mainstream users enjoy this too? For what's innovation's worth if it doesn't spread?

Ah, but therein lies the root of all FriendFeed's problems. The innovation of the social "like," of aggregating your web activity and letting others comment on it - all of this, all of FriendFeed's innovation, is spreading off-site. It's becoming popularized on Facebook, where a good portion of the social network's users have never heard of FriendFeed and (possibly) never will.

That doesn't bother FriendFeed, though. Says co-founder Bret Taylor:

"The ability to comment on and like entries has always been popular on FriendFeed, so it is not surprising to see it appear in other places. We have always been focused on building a unique, but open sharing and communications product, and we think that it's great when users are able to share things in more places. While there will always be some overlap in functionality between FriendFeed and large social networks, we believe there is a lot of room for FriendFeed to grow. The problems of sharing and communication are large, and we don't think they will be solved by a single product or company."

While that's true to a point - we certainly don't think Facebook will solve all our communication problems either - there is a valid concern that if FriendFeed can't cross over into the mainstream, they may not make it, especially given our current economy. Businesses still need to make money...and for web startups to make money they need users. Yes, more users than web celeb Robert Scoble and his 25,000 followers. Unless FriendFeed can prove to us that they can, without a doubt, monetize the long tail of technology early adopters, then they need to grow their user base. Can they do this? How? These remain unanswered questions as of now.

FriendFeed's Real Value

But don't get us wrong, FriendFeed's financial success (or lack thereof) is only one way to measure its real value. Obviously it's the one that investors and business owners care about. If that describes you - if you only care about the bottom line and all the nickels and dimes - then seeing FriendFeed's features swallowed up by the social giant that is Facebook may be worrisome.

However, if you measure success not by money alone but by pure, unadulterated excitement, the feeling that you've witnessed the birth of something new -something different - then it doesn't matter how many features Facebook steals for their own. All that matters is that innovation happened. It happened on FriendFeed. And you liked it.

Recommendations

In a tweet, the Noovo team told us that the app uses "state-of-the art deep graph mining and text extraction to recommend relevant content to users." A recent blog post explained further that Noovo uses "advanced algorithms to filter out the noise for you and recommends you the most relevant stories based on who your influencers are".

Further, Noovo recently deployed integration with dbpedia, the structured data version of Wikipedia. Noovo stated in its blog that this enables item-based recommendations, in other words pulling out topics from your user behaviour and that of your social network.

In many ways the recommendations part is like Digg's feature of the same name, in that it recommends interesting content from the site's community that you may like. And the more you use Noovo, the better the recommendations supposedly become.

Features Galore

Noovo is an interesting app and it sports a visually appealing interface. However, some of the main features are hard to find and then understand when first getting started. For example we had to hunt around to find out where the recommendations are (on the oddly named 'Cover' page, as it happens), and the hour glass icon is confusing at first glance (when you click it, it shows how the recommendations came about).

Adding content can also be cumbersome, unlike Tumblr where it is very simple and intuitive.

It's fair to say that these issues arise because Noovo has so many features - one could argue too many. But that also may end up its strength, because if you're looking for a central place to aggregate, share and discover cool content on the Web - Noovo could be a great choice for you. The community is small right now, but there is no shortage of colorful content to browse. Check out Noovo CTO Matej Pangerc's page, for example - you can see straight away that Noovo is very akin to Tumblr, Soup.io (my personal favorite) and other lifestreaming blog platforms.

We'll be keeping an eye on Noovo and testing it out some more. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

But there's another vast set of data many of us are creating on a daily basis that has little to no backup at all - beyond the services that host that content: our lifestreams. Now, a new service - named appropriately enough, LifestreamBackup - aims to provide the peace of mind that your lifestream data will always be just as accessible as the backup of your machine.

The most obvious example of this loss of access to lifestream data? The inability to access anything beyond beyond page 162 on Twitter. No matter how many times you've posted, you cannot go back any further than 3240 tweets. So, every new public message you send removes one from your history. (To see this in action, simply add "?page=162" to the end of any Twitter user's default URL.) Those who had seen Twitter as a journal of sorts for recording fleeting moments for posterity, suddenly found those moments just as fleeting online.

That's just one example. There are thousands of others: blogs crashing, videos being taken down, companies shutting down services. The list goes on and on.

The point being: saving the content you are producing elsewhere so that you always have access to it is going to become a bigger and bigger problem as time goes on - especially as more and more people move into the social Web. For that reason, LifestreamBackup seems to be ahead of the game with this proposed offering.

While not yet available, LifestreamBackup proposes to launch in the coming weeks. For a small fee, the service will take your various feeds and back them up on Amazon S3 - either your account or theirs. Current pricing is set at $6.95 per month for 10G of data.

"We will launch with the ability to backup Flickr and a blog (via RSS feed). Google Docs, Twitter feeds, Youtube and Facebook backup are all in the works and will come shortly after launch. If it has an API that allows us to pull data, we are happy to back it up for you."

For more, Lifestream Blog points us to a video from "Somewhat Frank" Gruber where a number of people - for the first few minutes - chat about the pros and cons of the concept.

Suffice it to say, it's a start. And, a step in the right direction. LifestreamBackup isn't likely to take the market by storm. But it's important to consider it, nonetheless, because it's definitely addressing a growing need.

We're still very early in this version of the Web. There's no doubt that saving the things that are important to us - our social interactions and our historical references - for future reference will become a very important business indeed.

(Image "Lifestream-Seaform" courtesy jemsweb. Used under Creative Commons.)

Love it or hate, there's no doubt that FriendFeed was one of the up-and-coming services of 2008. Although recently the service was the subject of a debate as to whether it would last - it's been described as too confusing and noisy for first-timers - those behind the service are asking us to give it time. Paul Buchheit, the ex-Googler and creator of Gmail who now builds FriendFeed, just recently reminded us that "overnight success takes a long time."

That said, if you're like many of the FriendFeeders we've seen out there, your lifestream on FriendFeed's site is probably being ignored. The only people whose streams are rewarded with likes and comments are those belonging today's big web personalities or those belonging to people who spend hours per day on site participating in the community and building a name for themselves.

That's why a service like Kakuteru, which finally lets you do something with your FriendFeed lifestream, is so appealing. Instead of hoping that someone will chance upon your activity on FriendFeed's site, Kakuteru uses FriendFeed as the raw source code of a lifestream which can then be modified as you wish by switching services on or off. All the while, the Kakuteru stream sits behind your own personal domain name, branding, and customized design.

Kakuteru is Not Sweetcron

If this sounds a little bit like Sweetcron, the self-hosted lifestream which launched back in August, you're half right. Sweetcron lets anyone host a lifestream on their own site in a way that's similar to a self-hosted WordPress installation. However, Sweetcron begins and ends at lifestreaming, but Kakuteru lets you blog, too. Update: Sweetcron developer Yongfook notes his software provides blogging functionality, but the implementation is different. Sweetcron is a lifestreaming framework and you can customize it however you want by using the API. Kakuteru offers less customization perhaps, but, by default it pins the most recent blog post to the top of the page.

This is an important difference because, let's face it, self-hosted lifestreams, while quite possibly the future, aren't necessarily going to replace long-form content by prolific writers. Yet for anyone who wants to incorporate a lifestream into their current blog now, the only other options are to create a new page on your site or smash a FriendFeed widget into your sidebar. There isn't a great way just yet to combine your lifestream and your articles into one continuous stream on the page. But with Kakuteru, you can.

The Kakuteru lifestream, which lets you toggle services on-and-off, would be even better if it let you do so on-the-fly. Instead of turning off Twitter and removing all the tweets from your lifestream, it would be great if Kakuteru would just stop posting Twitter for the time being without removing the older entries. That would perfect for bloggers who want to occasionally import extra content. For example, if attending an event, your Twitter stream could be switched on to integrate your micro-blogged activity; if recording video, you could enable your YouTube stream for a while, etc. Unfortunately, though, the Kakuteru toggle is an all-or-nothing switch at the moment.

The Kakuteru Service

Created by Dominiek ter Heide, Kakuteru has been keeping a low profile since it made its debut on Louis Gray's blog in late December. (Check out that article for a blow-by-blow on Kakuteru's features.)

At the moment, Kakuteru is in its earliest stage of development, which means the site is rough, a bit buggy, and sometimes slow. However, don't let that dissuade you: Kakuteru is a good idea. With built-in Web 3.0 features like auto-tagging (at last!) and other semantically-based options like the incorporation of articles from Zemanta, the blogging portion of Kakuteru is a glimpse of a next-gen platform.

Kakuteru also integrates Disqus comments out-of-the-box and allows you to add in other services like the Addthis social bookmarking plugin or your travel schedule from Dopplr. It even provides a native RSS feed for your stream.

Invites

Dominiek has generously offered ReadWriteWeb users invites to the still closed service. To get your invite, please comment here. (OpenID users - remember - we need your email address!). Invites will be sent out within a couple of days.