Social timelines are going mainstream (see AOL/Bebo), but startups are pushing them to the next level. Today, Lifeblob, the Indian startup working on ways for you to visualize your life on the net, is introducing a refreshed version of its social timeline creation tool. With it, you can easily patch together a visual representation of your life’s most memorable moments by timestamping certain events and enriching them with photos, text and videos. The end result can easily be shared on a variety of social services, or embedded into any blog or web page (example below).
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Lifeblob is one of the investments of SeedFund, the Google-backed VC fund who actively looks for early-stage financing deals within the Indian startup community. The company raised its first round of financing of approximately $1 million from the fund in August 2008. It employs only 4 people for now and its business model is centered around advertising – which it will start rolling out after its general launch – and premium services (like branded timelines, etc.)
Public timelines on Lifeblob can be searched by other people with ease. If they’re not protected, anyone is able to both view and share the “lifeblobs” with the rest of the world (thanks to an integration with SocialTwist’s Tell-a-Friend service). Privacy settings allow your updates to be private or publicly visible, or for your friends only. You can also opt not to be listed in the Lifeblob directory at all, while still getting a shareable dedicated URL for your timeline (here’s an example for Michael Arrington).
Lifeblob isn’t so much about the concept of lifestreaming as it is about being able to visualize moments in a person’s life, while showing relations to other people whose moments intersect with theirs. Those intersections can take the form of people, places, events, associated tags, and so on. Each intersection shows up as a stacked tile, which launches the associated timeline when clicked on. For example, if Mike Arrington met up with Gary Vaynerchuk, Loren Feldman, and David Recordon after a conference (here’s the photographic evidence that this did indeed happen) and all of them would have indicated this in their timelines or been tagged, you’d get a timeline that shows that connection inside the interface and lets you explore more relations and other people’s lifeblobs simply by clicking around a bit.
It also works as a marketing vehicle. For instance, here is a timeline of all of Woody Allen’s movies, with connections to timelines for actors who have appeared in his movies. The UI is nice, but if you click any of the frames in the embed above with a screen resolution lower than 1024×768, you’ll immediately notice it still needs quite a bit of fine-tuning, as you can’t resize it properly and the menu items are all over the place. That said, it’s a pretty cool service reminiscent of tools like Dipity and Kronomy but with a more social approach. Definitely a tool I’d consider using to recap events, which I think it is most suited for. Turning your whole life into a lifeblob seems like a whole lot of work, unless you could auto-update from other services (right now, only Picasa is supported).
Here’s a screencast on how it works:
Seems like a lot of work to create a “visual life feed”. Might be good for people that are into their own biography. Not sure this is going to fly, it even takes a while to understand what this is for.
I found their earlier user interface to me much better than this one, is it just me?
@john – The earlier interface was certainly more simplistic in its presentation. However, the new user interface is not just a replacement but a major enhancement over the previous interface.
We believe that it is more exciting and valuable to see how your relationships with people change over time than just be able to see data spread over a period of time. It was to provide this value that we simulated a 3rd dimension in the timeline to showcase these relationships and give you a view of how they change over time.
That said, I appreciate your feedback and would love to hear more as you use the new version. If there is sufficient interest, we could also provide the earlier interface as an additional visualization.
I also feel the same. The previous interface was very simple and easy to adopt. The new interface I feel is a little cluttered. Its in the early stages… So I will wait for it to mature and see how it improves.
The service itself is great.
Way to go Lifeblob .. good coverage
I have been using it from quite sometime and the latest update is a coolest feature
The idea looks good, but i guess it would need some more iterations for more adoption
Hi Robin – Thanks for covering us. Just wanted to add that we currently support Picasa, Flickr, YouTube, Blog / RSS feed, which should cover the most widely used services for media sharing. We made a conscious decision not to support twitter as it currently does not fit well with our focus on rich media visualization.
@Gubatron I agree that “lot of effort” to build a timeline would be a deterrent. That is the primary reason we support aggregation from the services you already use to start your timeline in a few seconds. Would love to hear other suggestions from you to make it simpler.
very interesting implementation. can’t wait to see more.
yes +1
hmm… not very original, but worth to try
i hope they have something unique.
darn, and it’s still very buggy
This certainly is promising. I have been using LifeBlob for some time now and I must say, I love the app. The latest version has some bugs but looks classy. Great work guys !!
There is a wealth of innovation happening right now in India. Lifeblob, Zoho, and many many others. As more and more immigrant now retrun to India to avoid the economic crisis in the US and Europe, we will see a new golden age of Indian entrepreneurial successes.
Anjali Sen
I’m not so sure about that, but do hope this is true. Would be great to see real innovation, not just copying, coming from India. A lot of great talent but difficul to overcome embedded mentality of thinking like robots/soldiers.
Tru dat!
Hmm, and what exactly is “real innovation”?
Facebook?
Apple Macintosh?
Copying and improving is the very bessence of innovation. I think you are confusing the meaning of innovation with invention.
no, i’m talking about a 90% piracy rate, outright copying of software (ask the ’software police’ of Bangalore, or even easier, just look at the projects listed on elance, want a copy of facebook? No problem, someone in india will copy it line by line for $10,000), and lack of imagination (and yes I’ve worked in India and intimately with Indians for almost 12 years now).
They couldn’t find teachers to teach “entrepreneurial” classes at ITT because it was not yet understood. As I said, I hope it changes – but there’s a massive learning curve. Apple indeed has innovation (iphone? ipod? are you saying those are not innovative?)
and, interesting that you say the drive is being produced by immigrants returning to India, teaching innovation. Hope they do spur some great companies. Would love to see it and not have India be the code monkeys for everyone else (and that’s not meant derogatorily for anyone who’s not heard that term in software)
@some dummy,
Well said…
Could you integrate Seesmic ? {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/w0evSBYv8F_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Could you integrate Seesmic ? ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/cL9ZMUy2Zc”}}}
Seems a bit buggy. Couldn’t import either Flickr or my blog feed. Seems odd to not support Twitter.
Wake me up when it’s functional.
I also feel the same. The previous interface was very simple and easy to adopt. The new interface I feel is a little cluttered. Its in the early stages… So I will wait for it to mature and see how it improves.
Good progress. Great potential to use as marketing vehicle as pointed out by Robin Wauters.
Congratulations! Pranav & XP, the new version is awesome, looking forward to hearing your great news.
Reminds me of: http://www.allofme.com
good for you.