iRadar: How To Use Webdoc As A Lifestream Service

Monday, May 30, 2011

How To Use Webdoc As A Lifestream Service

How To Use Webdoc As A Lifestream Service: "

Webdoc is a new social platform that is something of a chameleon. It can be seen as a simplified blogging platform, in the vein of Tumblr, a media rich social network, or it can even be used as a journaling or lifestreaming service.

With most lifestreaming services like Friendfeed, you simply plug in all of your social and online accounts, and any online activity is automatically saved in your account. Webdoc brings a new more hands-on approach of saving photos, text, videos, audio files, apps or even sketches.

To start using Webdoc, you can create a new account or sign in using your Twitter or Facebook credentials.

After signing up for an account you can find out which of your Facebook or Twitter friends are already using the service.

To create your first entry or webdoc, click the start a new webdoc and you will be presented with a dashboard of sorts where you can add the various types of content.

There are a variety of items which you can add to each of your entries, or your webdocs. As far as text is concerned, you can add a text bubble, rich text or html.

Text bubbles are fully customizable with a variety of choices for shape, orientation, color. You also have a variety of choices for the font type and size, color and justification.

You can also add entire paragraphs, with full text formatting and live links.

You can include basic sketches in your Webdocs, with the ability to adjust the brush size and colour.

When it comes to images, there are a variety of ways you can get them onto your Webdoc. You can upload them from your computer, search for images on Google or Flickr or import them from Facebook. You can also take a picture using your webcam, a great feature if you want to take a picture of yourself everyday in the vein of services like Dailybooth.

You can search for videos on YouTube and Vimeo, paste any link from a variety of video services including Hulu, Joost, DailyMotion and Viddler, amongst others. You cannot, however, upload videos from your own computer.

For the time being, audio files can only be added from SoundCloud which may be a little limiting, but since you can upload your own recordings to SoundCloud, there’s no limit to the kind of user-generated audio content you can share.

Lastly you can add Apps, little widgets that provide various types of content. Some of the available widgets include Twitter search and profiles, a countdown timer, a photo slideshow, a poll and more, allowing you to make your entries extremely interactive.

With each entry, you can choose whether to make it a public or private webdoc.

When posted, other users can post comments on your webdoc and add images, text and all other types of content available when creating an entry.

There are certain features that are lacking that, if added, would make Webdoc a real force to be reckoned with amongst lifestreaming services. Firstly, a mobile version of the site or a mobile app would make easy to capture images and more on the go. Secondly, the apps could be better used in a lifestreaming capacity if, for example, you could add your own tweets, Flickr images, and other content you share throughout the web, but limit it to the specific time period of that day.