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.

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.

Following on from my post the other day about Systems Builders, in which I touched on these themes: synthesis, analysis, visonaries, implementers. Some interesting trackbacks occured out of this. Let me first mention Jon Udell's post this morning, because his discussion of "sound bites" is particularly relevant to the points I want to make here. Paul Graham made a speech at Oscon 2004 that caused ripples of controversy around the Web. Ironically I haven't heard that particular speech yet, but I read Graham's 'Great Hackers' essay and listened to an earlier interview he did with Doug Kaye. Here's what Jon said about Graham's Oscon speech:

"Consider Paul Graham's remark. I suspect that most who commented on it did not actually hear it, but instead read it, or read about it. How much of its impact is conveyed by the text, and how much by the delivery? Whatever that ratio, access to the primary source -- the words as actually spoken -- is bound to affect the perception of the remark."

It's all about context. According to Jon's quote above, how you take Graham's remarks will depend largely on whether you heard them in the original audio or in text form (transcription, synthesis, extracts, etc). I'd go further and say that how you received Graham's remarks also depends on whether you listened to just an extract of the speech, or the whole thing. The most reliable context is listening to all of the original audio.

Jon Udell goes on to say:

"In the realm of public discourse, it's easy to imagine what this could mean. The presentation and analysis of sound bites has been almost entirely at the discretion of the broadcast media. Think how different it will be when we the media can choose the sound bites that we want to discuss."

Jon is putting a positive spin on the situation - every Joe and Jane Bloggs can now put things into their own contexts. We don't rely on broadcast media to do that so much now.

But... there's a flip side to that coin. Before I get to that, here's a bit more from Jon:

"Think about how we "write up" meetings today. Some people try to transcribe, and fail to synthesize. Others synthesize, at the risk of revising history. A collective synthesis rooted in the audio transcript seems like the best of both worlds."

It's true that a "collective synthesis" is very democratic and has wider breadth, because it's not just a product of a broadcasting elite (i.e. journalists). But let's not overlook the corollary of that: the more people you have transcribing, analyzing and synthesizing audio and text on the Web, the more things get taken out of their original context. For example, something that makes a great deal of sense within the context of the original source file, can take on a totally different meaning if you take a snippet of the original file and put it into your own post which is on a different subject.

Paul Graham wrote a number of controversial things in his 'Great Hackers' essay. For example, this paragraph:

"Hackers like to work for people with high standards. But it's not enough just to be exacting. You have to insist on the right things. Which usually means that you have to be a hacker yourself. I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up."

When I read that in the original essay, I understood the point he was trying to make: that to manage hackers you need to understand their spirit, to be in the same headspace. That theme was recurrent throughout his essay and therefore it strongly resonated with me. But when you take that paragraph out of the context of the rest of his essay (as I've done just now), it becomes much more blunt and the meaning changes. In fact when that paragraph is isolated from the rest of the 'Great Hackers' essay, as in Andrew's post yesterday, I now find I disagree with what Graham says. I don't agree that only programmers can manage other programmers - that's just plain wrong. In my view a visionary may not be a programmer, yet he or she can certainly lead a team of programmers in the implementation of his or her vision. Examples are Mitch Kapor and Marc Canter.

So you see my point? I had two different reactions to Paul Graham's paragraph on managing programmers - I agreed with him in the context of his original essay, but I disagreed with him when I read it again in Andrew's post.

Incidentally, at the end of his post Jon Udell mentioned Glenn Gould's The Idea of North (did he get that link from me, via my link to him?). The form of audio splicing that Gould did in The Idea of North is one method of putting things people say into new contexts and creating new meaning out of that. That was re-contextualizing as art, but what's happening now on the Web is context-morphing on a mass scale.

Microcontent in the form of sound bites, links and text extracts are the lingua franca of the Web. They enable us to bootstrap the Web of Ideas. But context on the Web is much more fluid and it morphs very easily. So when we link to something (a piece of audio or text) but give it a different meaning - what are the moral and ethical implications of that?

"This person can speak both the language of technology and the language of business. This person understands the specific business issues that a new system is supposed to address and is always looking for simple and effective ways to use technology to get things done. I call this person the systems builder."

The whole article is worth reading, but there are a couple of points in particular that resonated with me. Firstly:

"Look for the simple underlying patterns. This is the creative leap where investigation and analysis give way to synthesis and the design emerges."

Synthesis in logical terms is the opposite of analysis. It's when you combine individual elements of thought (the results of your analysis) into a coherent whole (the design). I loved the way Hugos expressed this: the "creative leap" that takes you from analysis to synthesis and the emergence of a design. It sounds more organic than iterative, doesn't it?

But it's not just any design that you want to emerge. Ideally the design should display these properties:

"Strive to create system designs that display an elegant simplicity. Use as few technology components as possible, and use each component for what it does best."

Elegant Simplicity... I should get that tattooed onto my forehead.

btw a follow-up article by Hugos is online: The Systems Builder as Leader.

I also did a bit of googling on "systems builder" and this article about INTJ types came up. As I'm an INTJ, this bit appealed to me:

"INTJs are known as the "Systems Builders" of the [Myers-Briggs] types, perhaps in part because they possess the unusual trait combination of imagination and reliability."

Yes, you definitely need imagination to make that "creative leap" and reliability to turn it into reality.

On another tangent, yesterday I listened to Dave Winer and Steve Gillmor and at one point they talked about 3 types of people in the Web world: users, visionaries, and implementers. Dave defined a visionary as being someone who has "an expansive view of what's possible". So I guess you'd put the Systems Builder into that visionary category.

When I think of visionaries of the Web, names like Mitch Kapor, Dave Winer himself, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Canter come to mind. I'd like to think I'm in that mold as well, although of course I'm yet to prove myself in the real world like those other folks have. I'm working on it though ;-)