Lifestream.fm Out Of Private Beta, Looks Like Ready to Compete with FriendFeed

I have just received an announcement from creators of Lifestream.fm that the service is out of private beta now with tons of new features worth trying out for everyone keeping track of the current trends in lifestreaming. Lifestream.fm was acquired by German social bookmarking service Mister Wong back in April and since then the team has been busy adding new functionality to the service staying in the private beta. And while the majority of features on Lifestream.fm are exactly what we are accustomed to on FriendFeed, there are also some absolutely unique features I have not seen anywhere else.

One of the coolest unique features of Lifestream.fm is mobile functionality supporting sending links via sms. As far as I understand, it is mostly useful to send links to interesting content to yourself for later reading somewhere away from your computer.

Another interesting thing is the approach to handling photos and videos you see in lifestreams of the people you follow here. For example, every photo you can enlarge to view right within the stream without leaving the page and YouTube videos you can play within the lifestream as well. And for every link you get in your stream you can also see a quick preview using integrated functionality of Websnapr service to do that.

There is also a unique feeling of openness to Lifestream.fm because it further encourages distribution of content discovered via its service. This means that every link that you see in your feed you will be able to further share on Facebook, StumbleUpon or other bookmarking services you have accounts with (and Lifestream.fm has a very broad list of supported services).

So instead of simply clicking “like” on your friend’s blog post you can now actually send this friend some nice traffic by bookmarking this post additionally in other services you generally use. I like this functionality because it encourages external communications in addition to internal activity around content.

Besides, here you can actually contact other users of the service in a private manner with direct messages without having to trace contact information on a blog or on another service where it is available. This one is a feature many FriendFeed users expressed their interest in.

In general, it looks like the guys over at Lifestream.fm listen carefully to what the community asks FriendFeed to implement - and builds it (and I don’t think there’s anything wrong about it - listening to the market and providing what the market needs is always good for competition). I do think Lifestream.fm can be a viable alternative to FriendFeed if you are looking for an alternative based on diversity of features and not on the number of friends that will migrate to this new alternative. And of course there is also a question of scalability that should be perfect if Lifestream.fm intends to compete with big players in the niche.