Why I Am Reinventing the Wheel and Rolling My Own Lifestream

A couple of folks have asked why I am basically reinventing friendfeed and presenting my lifestream  on seanreiser.com.

It all started when I began looking at my web information flow.  As I documented over there, I wanted to make seanreiser.com a hub to find out what I'm doing online.  By using Drupal's Activity Stream module I've begun aggregating some of my content.  You can read some of my adventures of my with the Activity Stream module here.

One of the things driving this effort was the realization that I didn't have copies of all my content.  Where I have all my photography and blog entries, things like my tweets, blog comments I've made and music I've listened to live on other servers and should they change their policies about allowing folks to extract information from their services I might not be able to access my back content, which is unacceptable to me.  

Where I could let Friendfeed do the heavy lifting, the same issue applies there.  Where they probably will be allowed and keep their API in place, I have no guarantees, so I've decided to aggregate all my content on my site.  As I'm making a copy of it, I might as well show it off on the site.  That hasn't stopped me from havening an account on friendfeed.

So I have a few services working  (my blog, flickr, twitter, del.icio.us and Last.fm) and have some more to go (google reader, disqus, friendfeed comments / likes, youtube and cocomment) but I am enjoying the coding and will all my content at my fingertips when I'm done.