SweetCron is a bit of self-hosted lifestreaming software from Yongfook, the creator of opensourcefood. It's kind of like a hybrid of Tumblr and Friendfeed. While SweetCron hasn't officially been released yet, Yongfook is already using it on his own blog, so we have a pretty clear idea of what you can do with it: feed in photos, videos, status updates, bookmarks, etc, each with a distinct look, so a reader can distinguish content types at a glance.

If this sounds a bit like Tumblr, that's probably because part of it uses the Tumblr API. SweetCron is customizable and extensible via new PHP classes, though, and it lives on your own domain, so you have greater control over the data you're feeding into it. The basic theme can be seen on Yongfook's blog, where he's testing it out, but he says you'll be able to develop your own themes through a template editor. If you're interested in SweetCron, sign up to be notified when it launches.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

HelloTxt is a web service that lets you send out status updates to your contacts on a wide array of social networking and micro-blogging services. The site makes it easy to send identical updates to Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, Plurk, Tumblr, and other popular and not so popular services. But up until recently there was one major problem with HelloTxt: The communication was one way. You could send, but not receive status updates.

Now HelloTxt has added a new feature called Status Snap which lets you read updates from your contacts on supported networks. Right now, only Twitter and Facebook are supported, but HelloTxt plans to add more networks to Status Snap over time.

In order to enable Status Snap you need to login to your HelloTxt account and click the Status Snap boxes next to each network you want to enable the service for. HelloTxt has also added a lifestreaming feature that shows all of your recent activity on your main page.

The Facebook mini-feed continued its expansion on Friday, adding YouTube, StumbleUpon, Hulu, Pandora, Last.fm, Google Reader, and your personal blog to the list of sites that can share data to Facebook. The import feature already included Flickr, Picasa, Digg, Yelp and del.icio.us. What's Facebook's goal with all of this? Over at ReadWriteWeb, Josh Catone speculates that Facebook is going to become the operating system of Web 2.0, sucking up the best features of other innovative sites.

Josh's idea makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider that the new Facebook profile design, scheduled to launch shortly, won't let you hide your mini-feed when you're looking at your profile. Facebook says this doesn't matter, because hiding it for yourself never affected which stories others could see, and they want users to know what they're broadcasting. If it doesn't affect anything, why take away the choice to hide it?

We'll engage in a little speculation of our own: by expanding the amount of info in the mini feed, and giving users as much exposure to it as possible, Facebook increases the value of advertising in the mini feed. They haven't announced any formal plans along those lines, but their recent moves (think Facebook Chat) seem to be targeted at increasing the time users spend on the site, which in turn increases its value to potential buyers. Just some mini-food for thought.

Facebook has rolled out two new features. The first is a Google Trends style tool called Lexicon that lets you graph popular keywords that have appeared on Facebook profiles, groups, and walls. The second is the addition of third party data to Facebook Mini-Feeds.

The graph feature is pretty much self explanatory. You enter a term, and Facebook will show you how frequently it pops up on the site. Enter two terms, separate by a comma, and you can compare their popularity. The Mini-Feed update is a little more interesting, but only a little. Users can now associate their Facebook accounts with Flickr, Picasa, Yelp, and del.icio.us so that pictures, reviews, and links they post to those sites will be added to their Facebook feeds.

The move seems designed to help Facebook compete with a number of new "lifestreaming" services like FriendFeed and Socialthing! which allow users to track updates from across a series of social networks. The difference between Facebook and those other sites is that FriendFeeed and Socialthing! let you track far more than 4 networks. Where's Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Reddit, and YouTube?

It should be interesting to see if Facebook fleshes out its lifestreaming features in the future. It would seem to be in the company's best interest to do so. Because if users decide that it's easier to keep track of their social networking data while visiting a 3rd party site like FriendFeed, that means they'll be spending less time at Facebook's page, which means less advertising revenue.

Information overload gets beat up with the help of Engagd. This converter allows developers of application and mashups to filter feeds and serve more personalized content.

Engagd has just broken into Alpha. This lifestream converter specially designed for developers merges clickstreams and other data forms together into an APML file. This file can then be used to rank and filter RSS feeds. It can also be used to submit information into other sites to create more personalized online information.

With many sites collecting data on users, Engagd will allow users to take control over their Attention Profiles. Through an Engagd API, developers will be able to add these Attention Profiles to applications and mashups through an API.

Who's up for a little stalking? Its ok, no Britney Spears stalking, just some RSS and ATOM feed stalking. iStalkr is out of beta and ready for users to create a world of spying and nosiness.

iStalkr is a web application that creates a "lifestream" that will track RSS and ATOM feeds from a variety of services that you might use throughout the day including Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Google Reader and Twitter over a time line. From that point, you can choose to paste a time line of data into a website or blog to let people know what you are up to, or monitor other people's timelines to see what they have been up to.

It's a pretty cool application, but really doesn't serve any other purpose.. Sure its great to see how many times someone twitters, when they check out their news feeds, and how many times they Digg something throughout the day, but it's just another fluffy Web 2.0 gadget.

[via Profy]