A first look at Kakuteru

Brand new in my inbox:

You signed up for an early BETA of Kakuteru. You’re one of the lucky few to give this service it’s first spin!  Kakuteru is a fully customizable lifestreamer that tries to ride the waves of the ever interconnected and semantic web. Right now it uses FriendFeed as an aggregation backend, but it also provides custom integrations like for example Dopplr for your travel schedule.

For those that haven’t received an invitation to the invite-only service quite yet, I thought I would share some first impressions about this “customizable lifestreamer.”

Setting it up

The setup process for Kakuteru was quite simple: enter in your name, a desired subdomain on the Kakuteru server, and your FriendFeed account.  Bang: a brand new Kakuteru.

Immediately upon setup, Kakuteru showed support for the following services:

• Flickr
• Google Reader
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• Pandora
• Seesmic
• Tumblr
• 12seconds
• Twitter
• Yelp
• YouTube
• Facebook
• FriendFeed

And there would probably be more, too, I gather, if I imported more into my FriendFeed account.

Additionally, some other services are supported on an “Extra Integration” page: custom DISQUS settings (although DISQUS is already supported by default), Feedburner, Dopplr, and AddThis.

Enjoying the view

Once you’ve got your new lifestream up and running, the view is pretty plain at this point.  You’ll have to view mine to get a complete picture of what I’m talking about here, but think someone’s Twitter page with extra links and tags at the right.

One neat little feature is the “trends” page which displays my activity over time in a variety of interesting ways.  One such view is the “activity by hour” view, as shown on the left.  It’s easy to see I’m busiest between 2:00 and 3:00pm, but I wonder if a service updates at that time (as seems to be the reason for spikes at 11pm and 7pm, etc.

First impressions

My overall impression with Kakuteru is that developer Dominiek has laid down an excellent framework for the next big lifestreaming service.  The way it piggybacks on FriendFeed makes for a very interesting design and development choice, and I’m looking forward to seeing where the service goes– and playing around with it considerably– in the upcoming weeks.

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