Iminta is what I’m in to. Get it? Aside from a clever name, this garage-based startup has a lot of things going for it. The first most noticeable thing is it’s very slickly designed, with a very Ajaxian style interface (just about everything on the site 
slides around or has some sort of animated quality to it). Those that are familiar with the functionality of FriendFeed will notice, aside from the very different styles of the sites, that there are some striking similarities.
The site relies on its users to generate the content of the site, like FriendFeed. Similarly, as I’ve in the past described FriendFeed as an online discussion forum where you select the folks who’s posts you see (and whose lifestreams act as the seed content), Iminta seems to function on the same principals, with more drill-down options. Instead of opening up to a vanilla white screen with links and text and comments, you open up into your own lifestream. You have three tabbed options, from there. You can view your public stream (which is an amalgamation of all your friends lifestreams), your comment feed only (items in your streams that have been commented on), and you can filter the various streams all by different media types (books, events, friends, music artists, photos, etc).
These are all very useful functions that, best I can tell, are largely missing from any other lifestreaming service I’ve tried. And unlike most other lifestreaming services I’ve tried recently, this is one that puts itself in direct competition with the FriendFeed-class of lifestreaming services (as opposed to other types like the Twitter-class, Tumblr-class, or Facebook Newsfeed-class).
The biggest feature that Iminta has going for it above and beyond FriendFeed is the large number of services it can track beyond what FriendFeed can. Out of the gate, the raw number of services Iminta can track is actually 26, two shy of FriendFeed’s 28 (and seems to focus more on places where you generate the content, as opposed to services like Netflix, which are slightly less online-activity centric). In this department, though, 
Iminta has a significant advantage over FriendFeed, presently. With FriendFeed, there is no way to add individual RSS streams. You can add a blog page, and it’ll scrape that page for your new postings, which is presumably fine for getting your blog content into the system. With Iminta, though, you can piggyback just about any RSS based content in through the Blog Content feature, which allows you to bring in almost any of the other services that FriendFeed or Iminta may have left behind.
We’ve got a side-by-side set of graphics here to show you the breakdown on the types of services supported by FriendFeed versus Iminta, but there’s another significant feature difference. FriendFeed is very Googley in a number of ways - the folks who started the company, the fact that the design is very sparse, and that almost everything is just text linked to the source. Iminta takes a different approach, re-syndicating full blog posts and full items into your lifestream view. This results in you leaving the site a lot less, but also having to page through the content a lot more than with FriendFeed.
You also get less of a 30,000 foot view than with FriendFeed, because of the full feeds. It’s hard for me to tell how useful this is versus FriendFeed’s approach, since the only person online to invite to the system at the time of this review was MG Seigler over at ParisLemon - thus there wasn’t a glut of conversation and feed items from multiple sources. I certainly don’t mind having to click extra to see certain stories that show up on FriendFeed that I might not already be familiar with, but on the other hand, I can’t deny the fact that I’d like at the very least a short description or the option to view the full article within FriendFeed - and that’s something that Iminta is already launching with.
Iminta is definitely an interesting entrant to the Lifestreaming market, and though it’s presently in private beta, once it becomes more widely used, I can see it being a viable alternative to the present leader in the space, FriendFeed. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, given FriendFeed’s widespread adoption - but then FriendFeed might not be everyone’s cup of tea either, giving Iminta a unique niche to fill.
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