Sweetcron – An experiment in Lifestreaming
I’ve been through many blogging styles (and blogs) over the past 2 years. Lately I’ve been trying to maintain a mixture of quick updates and longer article form posts so lifestreaming with segregation of full blog posts seemed to be the natural next step.
A month ago I discovered Sweetcron, a self hosted lifestreaming framework from YongFook. It’s not like Blogger, Tumblr (the magic beanstalk that runs this site) or anything else you’ve ever seen. It imports feeds on your online activity to one central page. More like a self hosted version of friendfeed without the friends.
The concept of lifestreaming appealed to me mainly because It could work on autopilot, dragging in the stuff I do all over the internet every day. Theoretically I could have a site full of regular content without any effort and I could throw in some chunky blog posts when I felt like it. Less effort/more content, it sounded too good to be true.
So I downloaded the Sweetcron Beta within hours of its release last week and played with it for a couple of days on a local server. It looked really awesome.
On the technical side Sweetcron has a few issues. Updating is really awkward there aren’t many supporting resources around. This is of course to be expected as the platform is only a week old and won’t be a problem in the future as the community grows.
Overall I rate Sweetcron as totally sweet and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to get into lifestreaming. It’s simple to use, well designed and looks sexy. Having said that I decided not to switch.
Why the change of heart?
My initial interest in Sweetcron was more like my interest in the iPhone 12 months ago, a desire to be at the leading edge.
Lifestreaming promotes very regular publishing of very trivial information. Every photo uploaded to Flickr, every song listened to on Last.fm and every tweet on Twitter would make up a lifestream. Really, who cares that I listened to Blink 182 this afternoon. Who cares that I ate a chicken apricot Panini for lunch. I certainly don’t, but if you do care about such things you can follow me on Twitter.
Content is king. I know that, but I think I briefly forgot. From now on I’m going to focus on writing more. Expect to see less frequent posting, but when I do post it’ll be because I have something (slightly) meaningful to say.
