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.

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.

Sweetcron is a self-hosted service, so you will need access to a server with PHP and MySQL running on it. After downloading the code, the install is pretty typical for that of self-hosted application. It's a bit more complicated than installing Wordpress or OpenTape, because you have to enter your data in numerous places and you have to edit your .htaccess when you want to install Sweetcron in a sub-directory.However, if you just follow the steps in the documentation, you should be able to install Sweetcron in less than 10 minutes.

After this, you just start adding your RSS feeds, and you are ready to go.

Final Result

The lifestream itself looks and works just like you would expect it, with a number of little surprises. One of the nicest features of Sweetcron is that it can format every new entry according to where it came from. A digg item, for example, gets a blue background, a Flickr items shows the photo on a green background with the caption underneath, and Twitter posts show in a blue box with your avatar in the top left corner (as long as you uploaded your avatar into the right spot in Sweetcron's directory structure).

By default, Sweetcron updates your stream every 30 minutes, but you can also set the cron service on your server to update more frequently.

You can write your own posts in Sweetcron as well, but the editor doesn't handle anything else but pure text and HTML code.

Bring Your Own Services

As of now, Sweetcron only creates your lifestream - if you want to add comments, Sweetcron recommends you install Disqus, and if you want to have a contact form on your site, it recommends you head over to wufoo to create one.

The two default themes are nice, especially the "Boxy but Good" one you can see in the screenshots here. Over time, others will surely start developing more themes and hacking the existing themes doesn't seem too hard.

Verdict

Sweetcron does exactly what it promises to do. It is important to note, though, that this is not a Friendfeed-in-a-box type service. Your lifestream stands completely separate from every other Sweetcron service (though you could create a master feed for a group by patching all the RSS feeds together and running them through another Sweetcron installation).

For those who just want to have a lifestream on their blog, for example, Sweetcron is a great solution, especially if you don't mind hacking Sweetcron to fit your own needs.

There are, of course, various other self-hosted applications that have a similar feature set (see Mark Krysnky's list here), and many of them come as Wordpress plugins, making their installation very easy. Few, though, give you the flexibility of Sweetcron.