Today I came across this video via Kevin Lim’s blog. It’s a bit old, (released on 9/28) and almost 30 minutes, but I found it to be very much worth watching. The video was created by A-List blogger Robert Scoble.

Scoble interviews both Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s architect, and John McCrea, VP of marketing. They speak in depth on Plaxo’s plight to create an open platform to allow for simple standards based interaction among social networking services. There is quite a bit of interesting information that had me stick to watching all 30 minutes of the video. I have to say that I’m pretty impressed by the Plaxo folks. Here I thought they were just this supercharged address book over the years and now they’ve decided to take on the plight of Lifestreaming.

I had already actually been playing a little bit with Pulse but hadn’t discussed it here yet. I just wasn’t grabbed by any of the functionality yet. Pretty basic and standard stuff. And the fact that you can only seem to share your Lifestream with other users of the service (they claim otherwise in the video, but I haven’t been able to find it) is a huge negative. I guess I’m just getting a bit jaded by all the “me too” services now and am looking for some innovation with all this data we’re aggregating.

One thing that’s pretty evident is that since Plaxo has a pretty large user base and a very viral model. Their position in those regards may make it easier for them to get existing users to start Lifestreaming. That could go a long way on the path to make Lifestreaming mainstream. The other benefit is that with an existing network of contacts it could make for a compelling central location for all your friends to congregate and make it a destination of choice for Friendstreaming. Only time will tell.

Here’s Plaxo’s details of the Pulse functionality.

Here’s my Plaxo Lifestreaming Widget

Lifestream Posts & Pages for October 29th 2007:

• From shoebox to performative agent: the computer as personal memory machine — Van Dijck 7 (3): 311 — New Media & Society – From author José Van Dijck comes an interesting article that covers Lifestreaming
• CleverClogs: Basics of Attention Profiling through APML – An easy to understand and well written primer on what APML is by Marjolein Hoekstras
• APML – Attention Profiling Mark-up Language: The open standard for Attention Metadata – Newly re-designed APML site for any info you need
• Emily Chang – Blog: Lifestream to APML – Emily discusses her forray into the world of APML and offers several resources as well

I came across this story today on Wired titled Plaxo Widget Brings LifeStreaming To The Masses. I’ve played around with Plaxo Pulse and think it’s actually pretty nice and was planning on covering it here. But that’s not what drew my attention from the story.

Here’s a quote from the story:

Plaxo’s Pulse social network aggregator is now offering an embeddable widget for those of you looking to jump on the “lifestream” bandwagon.

Every week I see more and more top sites using the term Lifestreaming and here Wired is even talking about bringing it to the masses. Very interesting time for those of us who have been early adopters and are looking forward to more of our friends and family to jump on the bandwagon.

Making it easier to create a Lifestream (along with the sources) and addressing privacy issues will be the main obstacles sites will need to overcome for Lifestreaming to reach a tipping point. I feel that for most people this will be achieved next year.

What do you folks think?

If you read my post “Lifestreaming named in top 10 future web trends” then you saw I mentioned Yowassup.com. Today I got a message via Pownce from Thomas Huhn who is the founder of the site. The message included a screenshot of the dashboard. I asked Thomas if I could share it with my readers and he agreed.

It’s a very interesting image that provides some insight into features that we can expect from this service. The status update feature appears to allow the use of the service as a publishing platform for other services. So whereas most Lifestreaming services are primarily “read-only” with regards to the content, this service appears to offer some ‘write” abilities.

I’m very much looking forward to test driving this service soon.

• Tumblr Takes 750K Series A – More proof that investors are now funding Lifestreaming. Tumblr gets funding
• Breaking: Google Acquires Jaiku, Why Not Twitter? – Mashable’s news on the Google purchase of Jaiku. Lifestreaming finally hits the big time in the form of a major acquisition
• Share Personal Memes on Meemi – Mashable info on another Tumblr inspired service called Meemi
• listography: your life in lists – Interesting minimal list creation site that could be used to create a manually based Lifestream. I found this via the first BoingBoing video show
• Soup turns big ideas into teeny blogs | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone – Webware info on Soup which is a Tumblr inspired Lifestream service
• Slifeshare Relaunches Sharing Network – Mashable info on Lifestreaming service Slifeshare
• Utterz: Yet another nanoblog platform… or is it? | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone – Webware info on a new service that has some Lifestreaming features
• Readr: Latest News Feed Aggregator – Mashable blurb on a new Lifestreamin service called Readr
• Elsewhere I’m: Relationship Update Stream – Interesting development from Six Apart on what appears to be another player in the movement happening to build backend systems to help communicate data in a better fashion than just polling for feeds.