Dandelife: Are You Ready for Lifecasting?

Sometimes I'm a little slow at catching on with new things. It took an interesting new look to Ross Mayfield's blog to get me to notice Dandelife, but I may have gotten hooked on this whole lifecasting thing. I was fortunate enough to spend some time IMing with Dandelife CEO Kelly Abbott about his vision for Dandelife as well as getting a bit of a newcomer's walk-through.

Dandelife started out as a blogging platform, but it's obviously a different application than its beginnings would suggest. With content aggregation (a bit similar to Spokeo) coupled with a timeline and the ability to add stories and tag your own “bits,” Dandelife actually provides a much more personal content aggregation. When they call it lifecasting, they weren't kidding.

Dandelife allows you to bring in “streams” from several popular social sites, including Plazes, Facebook, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and LiveJournal, as well as others, with plans for scores more to be added in the near future. What makes Dandelife so interesting, however is the level of personalization it allows you in adding commentary and “stories” to your streams, as well as the organized way of displaying them.

Since I was new to Dandelife, Kelly was kind enough to walk me through the operation of the site as well as where he hopes to take it in the future.

Cyndy: What made you decide to change the direction (away from a strictly blogging platform)?

Kelly: Some people were writing stories. But most people were “timelining” only. They'd timestamp a headline and that was it. So I started thinking about all the ways I could make it easier to record your life's details.

There's a Mark Twain quote… I live by. Which is essentially “the why” of it:

“An autobiography that leaves out the little things and enumerates only the big ones is no proper picture of the man’s life at all; his life consists of his feelings and his interests, with here and there an incident apparently big or little to hang the feelings on.”

Mark Twain’s Autobiography, 1906

Cyndy: Have you thought about any other 2.0 apps [as streams]?

Kelly: Yes, as a matter of fact, we're refactoring our feeds system now. It should be more or less universal…Separate them into Photos, Videos, Stuff, Places

(The list includes everything from 43 Things to Classmates to Google Calendar to MyBlogLog to ZoomInfo.)

Cyndy: I realize you work with Chris Saad in the APML workgroup... is there going to be a cross-functionality between Dandelife and Particls?

Kelly: Yes, there already is, actually. We are producing an APML feed from aggregated content [for future release]. We also are working together on Data Portability. Chris and I are working together to bring social streams into the particls notifications engine as well, a lot like an instant Dandelife streams network fed through Particls. We send out an email every night with updates in your social networks. You can download an OPML file for all of your stream content from us. We package it up for advanced users into one OPML file.

I found Dandelife to be a very attractive, easy-to-use, and organized way to manage my own online presence, and would love to see more people I follow use it as well. The simplicity is actually deceptive, and the addition of so many 2.0 services cover just about everything I use regularly (except Geni, but I did lobby for some sort of interaction between Dandelife and Geni during our interview) will only add to its usefulness.

I've been tired of logging into tons of different sites trying to keep track of everyone, from Facebook updates to Twitter Tweets I may have missed when I was offline. Dandelife may well become my one-stop shop for keeping up with everyone.