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What is Memolane?

It’s been said that everything you do or say on the Internet is there for ever. But even with all the various websites and services we use, it’s still not easy to collect all those tweets, posts, photos and other artifacts in a organized way. Flavors.me does a fair job of aggregating this data, and Facebook is doing more and more aggregation. But neither of these attempt to take a historical look back at your activity. This is where Memolane attempts to fill the gap, creating a digital timeline of your contributions.

Currently in beta, Memolane allows users to configure a variety of popular services and then automatically collects them in a timeline. The services supported include Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Picasa, RSS feeds, YouTube, Vimeo, Foursquare and TripIt, with support for additional services promised.

The results are pretty amazing. You can scroll back through time and see where you checked in, what you tweeted, what photos you posted and so on. Across the bottom of the screen is a series of vertical lines that represent a granular view of time that lets you quickly scroll through years of data. Slick!

You have control over whether you share this publicly or not, but I noticed some glitches. For instance, if you have photos marked private on Flickr, they still come over into your Memolane timeline. Depending on your Memonlane settings, they may be visible in your “lane” regardless of your Flickr settings. Not great, but then it’s still in beta.

If you’re interested, you can check out my Memolane here.

UPDATE: Beta Invites

Memolane Community Manager Meghan Krane graciously gave me an invite code to share with you (thanks, Meghan!). If you’d like to try Memolane for yourself, sign-up here using the invite code “hester”.

 

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What is… Flavors.me?

Anyone who’s been paying attention has seen the dearth of writing going on here lately. I’ve been experimenting with lifestream focused themes that let me feed the beast that is this blog in an automated, sound bite fashion using feeds from the various services I use on a regular basis; Last.fm, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Netflix, YouTube, etc..

And the lifestream is precisely where Flavors.me excels. As they describe themselves, “Flavors.me allows anyone to create an elegant website using personal content from around the internet.”

I read (briefly) about Flavors.me in one of the feeds that I scan, but when I saw Bryan Harney tweeted about Flavor.me, I decided to check it out.

The service very simply and elegantly does what it sets out to do — creating a portal to your presence on various social networks. You can upload a background, tweak the colors and fonts and configure which services you want to connect to and share. There’s no direct interactivity, but in my view, that’s a good thing. If someone wants to comment on your Flickr photostream or retweet that clever quote, they can click through to the source service and do it there.

The best way to “get” Flavors.me is to poke around and try it, but if you’re timid about sharing, Flavors.me creator Jack Zerby has posted a terrific video overview.

Now go check out my Flavors.me site, and then give it a try!

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The Newbie’s Guide to Twitter

Rafe Needleman at Webware has written a great introduction to Twitter titled the Newbie’s Guide to Twitter. If you’re curious about Twitter, Needleman provides a pretty good overview. He compare’s it too Google’s Dodgeball service, but easier to use.

Personally, I think Jaiku is the better Twitterer. It reads everything, including my new del.icio.us tags, Flickr photos, tunes played and more. As someone over there tweets: “Twitter is so March 2007…” Mashable even pokes fun at the buzz with the Evolution of Blogging (the cat version).

Check’em out, and you can follow me either here on Twitter, or there on Jaiku.