ReadWriteWeb

Path 2.0 is the first newfangled social app I've been able to get my friends to use since Facebook complacency set in. I had my reservations at first, when I was worried that Path would turn out to be nothing more than a pretty mirror for gazing at oneself. For a while, it was pretty lonely in there, but after using Path to document my week on jury duty, I knew the app could offer something meaningful.

As it turned out, the Path experience wasn't only compelling to me because I'm a professional nerd. Over the holidays, I showed Path to a bunch of my best friends, and they all fell in love with it. Now that I have close people there, Path has become important to me. It's on my home screen, and Facebook is not. Path is not on the Web; it's a place in itself, and that's why it matters.

An app called Path launched its version 2 do-over yesterday. "The smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love," it calls itself now. I ignored this app until today. All I saw from version 1 was emoji spam in my Twitter stream. Let's take it as read that version 1 failed to catch on, hence version 2. How does an app help you "share life with the ones you love?"

The tech "world," or "scene," or whatever it is, is in love with this app. It tingled with excitement when Path went "stealthish" in 2010. It launched later that year weirdly lacking in features, and the blogerati still fawned over it. What is it about Path? How does "love" arise from Objective-C and 3.5 inches of glass? By evoking the people in your life, of course. And Path does that, just as Facebook does. It's a life stream. An ego trip. "Share life with the ones you love," especially yourself.

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.

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.

With almost half a million broadcasters, popular lifecasting service Justin.TV could probably create a section for clown fightclubs and still have thousands of video voyeurs clamoring to entertain us. The company just launched its first in what is likely to be a long list of sub-sites. Gaming.justin.tv is a sub-site that offers viewers info, events and videos specific to the gaming community. The company is already working on followup sites with music and social channel queued up for the future.

What are you doing? How about now? Has anything changed since you started reading this blog post? Every story has a who, what, where, when, and why - but the event-driven nature of the social Web may be putting such a premium on broadcasting about what we're doing, that software designed to help us answer important questions like who and why are at risk of being neglected.

Reflecting on the human condition was once a popular past-time. A lot of people used to read poetry, as you may have heard. It may not be the Internet's fault that we're becoming less introspective - in fact the huge amount of activity data we're sharing online offers incredible opportunities for reflection, and for learning more about ourselves. It seems quite likely that we're going to miss those opportunities because our software is focused entirely on doing (and advertising) instead of on helping us think as much as it could. Of course that's much harder to do.

Skimmer is a design-focused new Adobe AIR application from Minneapolis Ad Agency Fallon. Part of a broader push for the company in revamping its image online, Skimmer is a very functional lifestream aggregator and media browser in its own right. Skimmer pulls feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Blogger and YouTube, and allows posting to Twitter, Flickr and YouTube as well.  But focusing on the underpinnings of this application would be doing it an injustice - it's got a handsome face, and that's the point.

Facebook today announced a major update to its homepages that will go live next Wednesday. The new homepages will put the news feed front and center and have both a filtering feature as well as a sidebar that highlights the most popular topics and links that are currently being discussed by your friends. The news feed is now also updated in real-time, while the old feed ran on a schedule and only updated a few times per hour.

When it comes to storing personal digital data in the cloud and serving it up in interesting ways - we're in the very early days of a brand new paradigm.

Today popular online storage company Mozy announced that it has been merged by the company that acquired it with another acquisition called Pi (Personal Information) - into a new forthcoming service called Decho (your digital echo). Pi was founded by Paul Maritz, who is now the CEO of virtualization powerhouse VMWare. What do you get when you bring these kinds of stars together into one service? Only a few clues are available so far, but we're excited to see what Decho becomes.