In Search Of A Storytlr Replacement

As a professional blogger, I’m always looking for good ways to aggregate my lifestream, especially so that I can collate posts from all the different places that I blog.

One tool that I really liked was Storytlr because of its ability to aggregate historical posts (in my case going back to 2006) and beautiful profile themes. But now its founders have decided to mothball the service. They say:

“The reason is simple: our lives have moved on, kids were born, house were bought, new projects appeared and we don’t have time anymore to operate this service properly.”

Although they have examined many options, including taking it Open Source, they still haven’t found a way to keep it going, which is bad news for those of us who loved the service. The good news is that you can export your lifestreaming history for import into another service.

Investigating Streamy

So what’s a girl to do? I’ve been hunting around for a lifestreaming tool that will replace Storytlr. Some people have suggested Streamy as a contender. Streamy does offer lifestreaming, it’s true, but the number of services it supports are limited (10 as compared to Storytlr’s 15), though one of those is Friendfeed, giving access to countless others. Streamy has a lot of interesting features, such as the ability to use it as a feed reader and as an IM client. It also gives you access to the same tools you would have at the original site, such as retweet links for Twitter entries and likes and comments for Facebook and Friendfeed. But although Streamy is interesting, it has more features than I need from a simple aggregator.

What Are You Inta?

Another viable and attractive option is Iminta, which supports dozens of online services (applications, books, discussions, events, games, images, links, microblogging, reviews, songs, stories and video), as well as RSS, so you can add practically anything to it. It’s got great filtering tools which are wonderful if you want to search your updates by source – great for tracking down where you posted a particular review, for example. Iminta stores a history of your online interactions but only from the day you started using it, unlike Storytlr which goes all the way back. Not many aggregation services offer that kind of history, so Iminta could be the best option.

I’ve also tried out Cliqset, which supports and impressive range of services and has similar filtering features to Iminta. However, it was slow to import updates and was a bit buggy, causing me to add services multiple times. It just didn’t work that well for me, though the interface is quite attractive.

The Best Lifestreaming Option

Finally, I considered one other option – setting up a new Friendfeed account just for the purpose of aggregating my written blog content. I already have a Friendfeed account where I collect everything, but I wanted one just for blog posts as this will form part of my professional writing portfolio.

It’s hard to beat the lifestreaming, aggregation and search functions built into Friendfeed. To do get a new account I had to use a new email address (easy with plus addressing in Gmail). I also made the feed private as I don’t want to spam others with my links.

Although I miss the ability to aggregate my entire posting history, in the absence of Storytlr, Friendfeed looks like the best solution so far to aggregate the content I have posted on various blogs and sites. How do you aggregate your blog content and lifestream?

Written by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online
Posted on December 10th, 2009 and filed under Blogging
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