I recently found this nice little plugin called StatusPress that shows your Facebook status on Wordpress. It’s been developed by Adam Walker Cleaveland (pomomusings.com) and serves a simple solution to bloggers who would like to easily integrate their Facebook status to Wordpress.

The initial release lacked a timestamp feature, which C. Scott Andreas (paradoxica) added. The only problem was that the plugin was not available as a widget – which is why I chose to continue where they laid off..

For this release, I have made some enhancements:

• NEW! Added the option to remove first name in the beginning of messages
• Available as a widget with options (controls)
• Option to enable/disable the timestamp
• Option to have the status item on your Wordpress page link to the facebook message
• A minor mathmatical calculation error fixed
• Tested to work with WordPress v. 2.7.1

Download the Plugin here!

Just after I finished the development and started writing this post, I found that Brian D. Goad (briandgoad.com) actually widgetized the plugin just as I. I have chosen to release it anyway

Quick setup instructions.

1. Login to Facebook and go to this link: http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php?filter=11
2. Right click on My Status in the right column and copy the link
3. Download the Plugin, install it and activate the widget
4. Paste in the Facebook feed URL to the widget option and enjoy!

You can see a working demo on my sidebar to the right. Let me know i you have any questions or new feature requests!

• 50 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs
  Smashing Magazine      

  Even though this collection is starting to get a bit old, it’s still a great comprehensive source for inspiration.

• Single-Page Portfolio Sites
  Web Designer Wall           

  Nice collection of simple, stylish portfolios.

• Keep It Simple, Stupid!
  Smashing Magazine           

  Simple is good – it can’t be emphasized too often. Here’s a few good examples.

• 20 Creative Russian Web Designs
  DESIGN Walker         

  Let the creativity bloom! (if it isn’t too cold over there in Russia)

• 2008 Design Trends
  Web Designer Wall     

  Man – can you feel the juices rushing to your fingers, urging you to start up Photoshop! Great resource.

• 40 Creative Design Layouts
  Smashing Magazine     

  As always, Smashing Magazine delivers each time. Very inspiring indeed.

Besides the above posts, there are sites that focus only on showcasing websites of high quality. That’s literally tons of inspiration available, ready to get devoured!

Here’s a few of my favourites:

• Web Creme provides a continious stream of well-designed websites
• Designer Whore has a more artistic look at web design and supply with a broad range of creative designs
• Minimal Sites emphasizes on the minimal design (hence the name) – great stuff
• Style Boost is also a great resource to keep an eye on

There’s probably a whole lot sites I’ve either forgot or don’t know about. If you have a favourite you think should be included on the list, feel free to drop a suggestion in the comments

• Social networking services: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace
• Communication and publishing platforms: Wordpress/Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter
• Social life aggregators: FriendFeed, Profilactic, Lifestrea.ms
• Social bookmarking and news: del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon
• Information search and lookup: (inevitable) Google,  Wikipedia, Dictionary.com
• Personal organization and communication: Gmail, MobileMe and so forth (Hotmail, Exchange, Yahoomail etc.)
• Video and photo sharing: Flickr, YouTube, Imageshack
• Online shopping: eBay, Amazon, Pricerunner
• Services to centralize the above (online desktops if you will): iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes

This is only to mention a few – check out Webware’s top 100 list for an awesome overview of current high-flyers. People I know, will recon that I love visualization. Statistics, workflows, networks, you name it, everything is so much more interesting when it’s visualized in a diagram of some sort. So:

Diagram picturing popular web apps 2008, categorized after purpose

I’ll claim that all of the mentioned web apps serves either one or multiple of the following three purposes: socialize, organize and/or informatize (self-made up word, but it needed to end with -ize ). Some will overlap, others will not quite fit any, but these are the major needs that web apps will to try to cover.

During the recent years, the development seem to have accelerated heavily, especially at the social aspects of digital online life. Actually, by the time I have published this post, plenty of new services have already surfaced, spreading like a steppe fire. Besides the many new services, a whole deal of new platforms, devices and technologies takes the services to a whole new level and makes the possibilities almost endless. Just consider digital life in terms of: mobility, accessability, reliability, compatibility, extensibility and usability - all undergone tremendous advancement. Simply put, the possibilites have never been as intriguing as now.

Now, what I find the most interesting is how we make use of all the possibilities presented to us. This is the first post in a series, where emphasis will be on this particular topic: how to get the most out of the digital revolution currently taking place..

In brief, a lifestream is “a record of a person’s daily activities, aggregated from online sources such as blog posts, social networks and photo publishing“. The word Micro Blogging is about the same. The idea isn’t entirely new actually. Facebook might be the very first example of lifestreaming made available to the masses. The Mini-Feed updates combined with the ability to import content from other services (Flickr and del.icio.us e.g.), provides the ability to make online activity of the user available to friends. But this is just the beginning.

Many websites are already discussing lifestreaming and trying to predict it’s future. Here’s a few:

• Krynsky.com: Lifestream – Could it be the next big thing?
• Read Write Web: The future of Lifestreaming revealed
• Adactio: Watching the stream
• Steve Poland: IDEA #23 – Your Syndicated Chronological Life
• KK: Lifeblogging, An Inevitability
• Lab Confidential (in danish)

Who does it?

Enough of the talking already, let’s see how some of the lifestreamers do it themselves:

• Julie Allison: Julie became famous for her extensive exposure of her personal life. What’s particular interesting about her website, is the beautiful harmony between design and content. Her site scrolls horizontal, probably illustrating a chronological timeline, and contains different kinds of media – video, bookmarks, small notes and even personal e-mail excerpts. As ReadWriteWeb writes, Wired Magazine even brought an article about her discussing the Internet as a self-promotional medium.
• Yongfook: Also great use of design elements, that support and awakens the interest for his posts (stream).
• Cheslow: Another example of a somehow fanatic lifestreamer is Cheslow. This guy really takes it to the max, aggregating data from all kinds of sources. Check out his “where to find me online” list – impressive (or scary?).
• Krynsky: Yet another example of information flow from various sources

More here.

What does it take?

In order to lifestream, you need a set of content sources (obviously). I’m not sure which target audience I’m trying to reach here, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that all of us uses some kind of online services. Among the most popular are Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and del.icio.us. All of these encourage the user, you, to interact, store and add content in some way of another. Actually, Twitter IS a lifestream web application, that’s specifically designed to make small “quick posts”, thus creating a stream of content about your everyday life (you got it: life-stream). A more comprehensive list of services can be seen here, here and here - basically, everything that’s “feed-able” can be included in a lifestream.

Now, one of the biggest concerns for the average joe is the technical challenge of making this work as a published combined stream. Thankfully, christmas has arrived early this year. A great deal of free services have already emerged, making it extremely easy to make combine all your online activities into a single feed. Here’s the biggest ones I have stumbled upon so far:

• FriendFeed: great service that automatically collects all your services’ feeds, aggregates them and even gives you the ability to integrate this feed to your existing blog or social network service (bonus info: founded by ex-Googlers)
• Jaiku: Google’s new acquisition Jaiku seems very popular already.
• Tumblr: simple, yet effective – also very popular.
• Sweetcron: Yongfook’s lifestream app that’s available (or soon will be at least) for your own web server. This means you can run it yourself, customize it like you want and remain full data-control. 
• Wordpress plugins: a few different plugins have been made for Wordpress.

An extended list can be found here and here. 

Thoughts

The whole idea of lifestreaming is very interesting indeed, but none-the-less, a few uncertainties comes to my mind. Besides the many possibilities, I would like to emphasize a few topics:

Where’s the border between privacy and public availability? There are so much information that can be derived from the use of daily web services, that spying, phishing and spiteful Social Engineering is starting to emerge as an even larger threat. Security and control is an issue that needs attention. Another thing that I know could be my own Archilles’ heel is the amount of involvement and time required to maintain a lifestream (and read others!). A decent flow in the stream demands input from the social services. If the lifestreamer isn’t using these services on a daily basis or only uses a few, the idea is easily lost. An interesting discussion about these topics among others can be found at Just Seven Things.

Before I finish this post off, I would like to encourage my good collegue and friend Ulrich to bring up this topic on his blog Problogging.dk, as I think lifestreaming and blogging in general is very closely related. Anyhow, I’ll be keeping an upon eye on how the whole concept progresses and possibly also launch my own  stream here on the website