SweetCron, a new blogging software that would soon be launched by a Tokyo based web designer, lets you life stream all your social activities on your own hosted blog instead of life streaming it over at Friendfeed.
SweetCron could be described in one sentence as a hosted Friendfeed. So now you don’t have to worry about setting up an account on Friendfeed to life stream your activities and in turn let Friendfeed get all the traffic and potential revenues (in the future) for what you have created. You can add a photo on flickr, a twit on twitter, a video on Youtube, a friend on Facebook and all of it would automatically appear on your blog hosted on your own personal domain. Once you have set up your own life stream blog, any one could subscribe to it, just like they subscribe to your traditionally hosted blogs on WordPress.
Self hosting is not the only similarity that SweetCron has with WordPress. Just like WordPress it is also completely customizable and 100% open source. So you could build a plugin or a new theme for yourself, if you may so desire. See the default boxy theme for SweetCron that would ship with the software once it is made available. I am extremely excited and pumped up about SweetCron, because some how I have this feeling that it would do the same thing with Friendfeed that WordPress did with Blogger i.e make it irrelevant.
The software is not released yet, but Yongfook promises to do that at the earliest.
The reason why I am excited about it, is that there is a huge amount of money at stake. Robert Scoble couldn’t kept himself on wordpress.com for long and moved on to his own hosted blog, just because he was unable to let go the money that he could make this way. It would be interesting to see for how long people like Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Pete Cashmore and the other top guns continue to use Friendfeed and generate traffic for a site that is not their own. Yes some would argue that Friendfeed provides a lot of features like rooms etc on top of simple life streaming, but services like those could be build separately on top of the RSS feeds that each one of us would be generating. I am anxiously waiting for SweetCron to launch.
It’s a good information to know about sweetcron, cz i’m learning about it.
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Don’t you think that the real value of FriendFeed (before the Facebook buyout) was the community? Sure, a lifestream is one of the features, but what really made Friendfeed what it was/is – were the people the interacted within the service.
So while SweetCron may be cool, it most likely won’t have the mass effect that FriendFeed had. A few “guns,” as you call them, will use it – but when it comes to having a real discussion – that won’t be a key feature for the mass populous.
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