Storytlr was a service that allowed people to create a stream of posts from a variety of services also known as a lifestream. Storytlr was different from a service like FriendFeed because the focus was on creating a website from the content instead of just a profile on a social network. In that sense Storytlr was a hybrid content aggregator and lightweight CMS. Unfortunately for users, including myself, the Storytlr announced they were shutting the service down effective 12/31. At the same time they decided to take the platform open source, allowing people to run their own version of the service. That was back on October 10th. 

Today the Storytlr team announced the open source version of the project. This is good news for people who want to create their own site based on the service. I downloaded the code and tried it out on my hosting account to see what they've done. For a first release it works pretty well. There are some key issues to be addressed. While I was able to add accounts from Delicious, Twitter and YouTube I had problems with Google Reader, Flickr and RSS Feeds. So while I think it's worthwhile to download and test it's definitely not ready for a production site now. That's okay because this is open source and I would bet that the issues get addressed.

There are a lot of other compelling features offered by Storytlr like multiple themes, embeddable widgets, Google Friend Connect and Disqus comment integration. I haven't tried them all on the new open source platform yet but a quick spin through shows that the key pieces are in place. The best part about it is that you're in control, can host it on your own domain, and keep it going as long as you want to.

You can see my test install over at http://live.awakenedvoice.com.