Webware

Lifestream Backup is a new service that backs up your data from a handful of popular online services including Flickr, Twitter, BaseCamp, Google Docs, and WordPress. You just provide it with your log-in credentials (or give it permission through authentication), and it quietly makes a daily or weekly backup of all your data from each site. It can then be viewed and downloaded if one of those places suffers an outage or data loss.

For $30 a year you get 20GB of storage, which is shared across all of the different services and hosted on Amazon's S3. If you have your own S3 account it's only $15 for the whole year, and it does not impose any storage limits since you're paying for that separately through Amazon. (Note: The prices are slightly lower than these for the next 10 days as part of the site's launch.)

You pick which services you want to hook it up to, and it will back them up automatically.

(Credit: CNET)

To give it a good test drive I tried it on my Flickr and Twitter accounts, as well as my Delicious bookmarks and Google documents. It took a little under a day to pull everything in, although the length of time it takes depends both on when it begins its backup, and how much you have on each service. The only exception was Delicious, which was never imported despite me providing the correct credentials.

For Twitter it saved all of my past tweets in an XML file which could not be viewed in Firefox, IE, or Chrome. Instead I had to open it up in Windows Notepad and parse through coding wrappers to get to each tweet. They were all there though, going all the way back to 2007. Not a bad start, but the presentation left something to be desired; a spreadsheet would have been nicer.

As for Google Docs, what's nice is that it can grab documents from multiple Google accounts. I had it hooked up to two of mine. It pulled them in just fine, although it did not mark which account was which. It also does not tell you what type of document each saved item is. If they're text files this isn't a problem since they display right in your browser. If they're spreadsheets or presentations though, you have to save them to your hard drive and open them in something like Excel.

Of all of the services I tested, Flickr took the longest, and with good reason--photos are big. I've got more than 3,200 photos stored on Flickr. For size reasons, it does not download the full-quality version of each photo, which admittedly would fill up your 20GB quite quickly (my 12 megapixel shots run around 3MB to 4MB a pop). Nonetheless, I found this to be a major shortcoming, especially for pixel-peeping snobs like me who like to zoom into the details of large photos. It also did not keep any of the categorization I had worked so hard on back over on Flickr. Sets, tags, descriptions--none of that gets backed up.

Lifestream Backup's archive pages are not much to look at, but they do save your data, and let you download it in case one of those sites is down.

(Credit: CNET)

I'd also like to see it do a better job at presenting the files. For instance, it shows when the files were backed up, but does not let you see when they were originally created. You also cannot download your files in bulk. Instead it must be done one at a time. For retrieving single files this obviously isn't a problem, but if you're trying to re-archive an entire gallery of photos, or folder full of documents it can be time-consuming.

Faults aside, I think Lifestream Backup is really on to something, and has big potential. Many of the services it backs up have very comprehensive backup systems of their own. That doesn't mean diddly when they go down though. If you're using any of them for business and want a surefire way to access your content, Lifestream Backup provides that. The one weak point there is if the source service is also using Amazon S3, which is what powers Lifestream Backup, then you really are out of luck until S3 comes back online.

AOL continues to upgrade the Bebo social network it bought in 2008, layering in more functionality from the social data aggregator SocialThing it also acquired that year.

In December, we covered Bebo's new Social Inbox, which gathers social updates from your friends on other services and shows them on your Bebo home page. There's also a new feature, Lifestream, which will collect data from the Bebo user's external sites and put them all into one data stream that any Bebo friend can see. This feature is reminiscent of the social network aggregation function in FriendFeed.

AOL on Monday is announcing several more enhancements to the Bebo service, although not all of them will be available to users immediately.

The Lifestory feature puts all your Bebo activities into a flashy timeline.

(Credit: AOL)

Lifestory is glitziest of the new features. It gathers your Bebo photos and events, and puts them into a album player that sorts them into chronological groups. Basically, it makes a fancy widget out of your life.

Bebo is getting somewhat granular privacy controls, with a feature called the Social Slider. It allows you to tag every element on the social network as appropriate for friends, family, or your "inner circle." This is a welcome, if not unique feature, although calling a control with three levels a "slider" is a bit misleading. The feature can also be used to filter incoming messages to just people close to you.

The Lifestream function collects social activity data from people around the Web, even if they are not Bebo users.

(Credit: AOL)

Bebo's native instant messenger and AOL's AIM are getting integrated, so Bebo users will be able to communicate with AIM users. AIM users will also soon get Bebo profiles, which area bit richer. The company is also promising a new instant messenger experience. A release sent to journalists says, "In Q2 we will take this one step further, providing AIM users with a radically new experience for real-time communication with everyone and everything they care about." Perhaps the company is eyeing to compete with Meebo -- or maybe there's an acquisition we'll hear about (but to be clear, that's just speculation on my part).

The service is also getting a feature called Stories. It sounds like it will be a form of group blogging, oriented around events. But AOL is not saying much more about it, aside from promising a March release for the feature.

AOL execs clearly want to differentiate the Bebo network from other social nets, especially Facebook and MySpace. However, the protests sound strained. Bebo is a social network. It has different features, but it competes with the big networks (Bebo claims 22 million users versus Facebook's reported 175 million). AOL does own several interesting social data companies, though. In addition to Bebo and Socialthing, the company also owns the Q&A service Yedda, and it acquired the widget company Goowy Media. It has all the pieces and parts to make innovative and interesting social applications. All it really needs is users.

After gaining a lot of press initially, Yahoo's experimental live streaming site, Yahoo Live, will be shut down on December 3rd. While it does not appear that the closure of this Yahoo Brickhouse project is directly related to the current economic downturn, belt tightening at Yahoo may have played a role. The leading factor in Yahoo Live's closure was, most likely, its inability to gain a lot of mainstream traction. For example, the top stream on Yahoo Live, at the time of writing, has 58 viewers, while the top stream at Live's competitor, Ustream, has over 8,000. Surely with this sort of stagnant growth, Yahoo was forced to axe the project.

The site will be holding a town hall on Wednesday to, "toast Yahoo! Live."

Facebook has recently launched a new feature that takes aim at life-streaming sites FriendFeed and Twitter. Facebook's Live Feed is an evolved version of its hugely popular News Feed feature.

Facebook's new Live Feed allows you to view all of your friends' updates in real-time.

Found via a tab on the Facebook homepage, Live Feed loads up all of the stories from your friends and updates the list in real-time. The feed is available in Log Mode (seen above) or the more traditional Full Stories. When one of your friends does something, Live Feed slides everything down, making room for the new story, which fades in. The stream is very cool to watch roll down the screen and makes good use of the classic Web 2.0 AJAXy feel.

It's no secret that Facebook has been pushing its microblogging and life-streaming features to the forefront of the site recently. Facebook's "What are you doing right now?" feature is extremely similar to Twitter and its commenting system for news items is very reminiscent of FriendFeed. Facebook's implementation of Live Feed makes it a lot easier to watch what all of your friends are doing.

FriendFeed and Twitter are both very good at what they do, but have yet to gain the mainstream appeal that Facebook enjoys. Facebook is adding another feature that FriendFeed has long had and that has very similar functionality to Summize (now Twitter Search), so maybe it's time for them to start getting worried. By exposing its large user base to these features that FriendFeed and Twitter have perfected, Facebook poses a real threat.

It's gossip no more: as rumored, Germany-based social-bookmarking site Mister Wong has acquired the social-media feed aggregator Lifestream.fm for an undisclosed amount. The news was originally reported on digital-media blog Mashable.

Mister Wong previously acquired Websnapr and Pixer.us, which were both created by Lifestream.fm founder Juan Xavier Larea.

Technology from Lifestream will likely be integrated into Mister Wong user profiles so that members can pull in feeds from their social-networking accounts across the Web.

"Mister Wong is 100 percent based on RSS, and we thought that (Lifestream) is a great extension for our user profiles, for example," Mister Wong spokesman Christian Clawien said in a Wednesday interview with CNET News.com. "With Lifestream, we have the possibility to integrate even more digital activities around these bookmarks, so this could be a very interesting combination."

For Mister Wong, which Clawien said has greater reach in Germany than Yahoo-owned bookmarking giant Delicious, this was also a way to get a stake in the trendy "lifestreaming" market. "We've done this acquisition very quickly, because in Germany, other sites emerging at the moment also take part in this field of 'lifestreaming' features," Clawien explained.

Yup, we've got that in the U.S. too.

Editor's note: This post has been updated from first publish. See note below for more.

This morning Justin.TV has relaunched itself as a live video platform. The site is planning to enable video livecasters to build out their own video broadcasting page, complete with a custom URL, branding, and chat room. Unlike uStream.TV, which has made similar functionality available to anyone and everyone for several months now, the initial crop of broadcasters who want to use the platform will be handpicked by Justin Kan and crew. Eventually it will be opened up to anyone.

For viewers, Justin.TV has added an interesting new feature to sort through archived clips. Called "tips," users can now vote on and add their own favorite moments of Justin.TV. Other users can vote up the clips, which gets its own top 10 section on the front page. This tipping functionality has been built into the Justin.TV flash video player in the form of a "tips" button, which will automatically spit out a URL to share with others, along with embed code to put it on blogs, Web sites, and social networking profiles. The goal is to make Justin.TV content more accessible and easier to sort through.

Justin.TV now features a top 10 most popular clips listing, along with a way to archive and share live clips with others...that is if Justin wakes up.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Another addition to Justin.TV is the new archive viewer, which shows up as a calendar where users can input the date and time of previous Justin.TV videos. They had actually rolled out this functionality earlier in the month, although it wasn't as well integrated with the live video. Finding old clips wasn't working so well when I tried it earlier this morning, but I assume they'll iron out the kinks as the day goes on.

Maybe the funniest part of this relaunch is that Justin was fast asleep well into this morning. Not to belittle Kan's dedication (the site has been going strong for more than two months now), but nearly every time we cover new and upcoming social sites, developers and site creators are glued to their screens on opening day--interacting with existing users and those checking out the site for the very first time. If this had been my first time visiting the site, I likely wouldn't have come back.

Update: Justin.TV's producer Michael Seibel dropped us a line, and wanted to note: "...we are building a platform for live video online and not a video blogging tool. In addition, we are opening up our network in the near future and right now we are selecting participants so we can slowly scale up our network." This post has since been edited to reflect those changes. - Josh

[via TechCrunch]