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).

It’s an invite-only service for now, but we have an unlimited amount of invite codes for you. It’s simply techcrunch and you can use it to sign up here.

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:

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Want to follow every Tweet, blog post, YouTube video and Flickr photo put out by the Obama or McCain camps? Now you can follow the campaigns in a handy Dipity Election Center timeline. Using its latest Dipity 2.0 timeline mashup, the Election Center places each entry on a timeline that you can scroll through. Click on an entry, and a box opens to show you more detailed information. You can also leave a comment.

Each timeline can be embedded as a widget anywhere on the Web. And you can see everyone’s comments from any widget. The idea is that Obama supporters will put the Obama widget on their MySpace page or blog and that McCain supporters will do the same on theirs. I’ve embedded both widgets below. You can see by the larger number of entries for the Obama campaign that it is making better use of social media to get its message out. (At least that was the case when I looked at the timelines—see screenshot).

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Dipity, a timeline-based lifestreaming aggregator, has launched its 2.0 release to the public. The new release includes a variety of new social features that have turned Dipity into a viable alternative to FriendFeed and other lifestreaming services, as well as a replacement for standard RSS readers.

Dipity revolves around powerful timelines built in AJAX, which intuitively display content like blog posts, YouTube videos, and Flickr photos in small hovering rectangles that can be expanded. The site is very well designed, and while the timelines seem to lag occasionally when they refresh, they’re fun to play around with (and if you don’t like the timelines, there are a few alternative views).

The service itself should be familiar to anyone who has used FriendFeed, SocialThing!, or any number of similar sites. Users are asked to input their account credentials from services that include Flickr, Picassa, and Twitter, which are used to populate the timeline. Beyond these, Dipity allows users to automatically monitor keywords across services like Digg and YouTube (you can have new Obama videos automatically appear in your timeline), and RSS feeds.

The site also include standard networking features – you can become friends with other users on the service, follow your favorite members, and look at timelines that are public (the default setting) to see what your friends are up to.

Dipity originally launched last April, but Director of Products BK Gupta says that this was primarily a technology demo that the company used to test and flesh out its features. In the meantime, the site has produced a number of cool mashups incorporating its timelines, including a Digg timeline called Archaeologist and a similar product for YouTube (you can now incorporate both of these into your main Dipity feed using the keyword search).

My biggest concern about Dipity is whether or not it will be a practical place for users to carry out discussions around the items they share. FriendFeed isn’t popular because it looks especially attractive – it’s popular because it’s conducive to helping users participate in “the conversation”. That said, Dipity’s timelines are fun enough that the company may not even need to view itself as a direct competitor to FriendFeed. I may go to FriendFeed to talk about current events, but if I had to choose a widget to put on my blog, I’d probably go with Dipity.

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TimeTube is a new mashup from Dipity, the interactive timeline site, that takes the mostly unsorted mess of videos that is YouTube and arranges them by date, offering a useful (and often unexpected) perspective on recent events.

Links to each video are situated across a horizontal timeline, with emphasis placed on the most popular videos (they appear bigger). Users can expand or contract the timeline to isolate a particular time period, and the viewing window features a handy “next event” button.

The site is a great diversion. The featured searches, ranging from Global Warming to David Hasselhoff, are all impressive, but half the fun comes from finding your own gems using the keyword search (recent scandals work best). I’m particularly fond of Eliot Spitzer’s TimeTube, which provides a nice contrast between his cheery political ads and the infamous Client Number 9 debacle.

TimeTube seems like it could be a handy reference for getting quick overviews on current events, but at this point it won’t be much more than a novelty for most people. Videos are placed according to when they were uploaded, which isn’t always indicative of when the events shown were actually taking place, making the validity of the timeline shaky at best. That said, if the site can figure out a way to keep dates consistent, TimeTube could evolve into a powerful tool.

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