image courtesy of Arun Thampi

Today’s news uncovered by Arun Thampi that Path has been uploading users entire address book to their servers does not bode well for them. You can read coverage around this issue on ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, and Venture Beat. But none of that coverage discussed the future implications as Path has already announced future support for health tracking devices.

I’ve become a big fan of Path over the last few months. It provides a beautiful mobile Lifestreaming app and offers some nice syndication features to boot. But  I became even more excited as I heard about the possible future integration with the Jawbone Up. Having a single app to use for Lifestreaming as well as tracking health activity is a very interesting development. Then just a few weeks ago I learned of the newly announced Nike Fuelband which is a new health tracking device that Path announced it will support. So it’s now clear that Path is definitely going to integrate health tracking devices and data into their app.

It’s one thing to compromise users trust when it comes to status updates and other social data, but health data takes that to a new level. It’s a shame that this unnecessary data exposure will no doubt make users take notice and perhaps dissuade them from using the app as they move into their next phase of integrating health data. I hope the Path team can reconcile this issue and provide a means for ensuring it doesn’t happen again in the future. It’s such an elegant app with a bright future that will delve into an area (Lifestreaming + Lifelogging) that nobody else has entered yet. Hopefully they’ve learned from this and will provide a clear on-boarding method for the addition of their health devices support later this year.

UPDATE: Path’s CEO Dave Morin wrote a blog post where he admits the company made a mistake and apologizes. Path also deleted all address book data from their servers and have released a new version of the app that allows users to opt-in to address book sharing if they wish.

I stated in my previous post that:

I think the majority of users on Facebook will not like this transition as they mainly use the service to communicate and share information with their friends in a simple clean interface and timeline will now become an obstacle to that.

I also felt the timeline should have been a supplemental view instead of a profile replacement and if only 11% of users embrace it, then it will most likely fail miserably. It’s a distinct departure from both the current utility and UI of the service. I went through my timeline and there are huge gaps and the primary reason for that is that I don’t use Facebook as the hub of my Lifestream. Most of my content was posted on other services. Most of photos were posted on Flickr, my status updates on Twitter, my videos on YouTube…etc. Unless you’ve been using Facebook as the central repository for all of your social sharing, or plan to do so moving forward, then it doesn’t quite make sense to be your Lifestream’s home base.

This blog was created because I was researching tools that gave me the freedom to aggregate the content I created to create a Lifestream across various different services I wanted to use. I think many people enjoy that freedom and don’t want to be confined to the limitations of a single service and its limitations to do this. Facebook does appear to have built in the hooks to offer us the ability to cobble together a few custom apps that we will be able to place on our timelines (such as the spotify app) to provide a way for 3rd party services to power our Lifestream on Facebook. However I’ve also stated in the past that mainstream users won’t go down this path and Facebook could presumably become a Lifestream for them. With the rollout of timelines we shall soon see what mainstream users think of it and whether it will resonate with them.

image courtesy of flickr user Julia Shore

Here’s the comment I posted on Adam’s live chat:

As someone who has covered the emergence of sharing our lives online at Lifestream Blog I have also given some thought as to what happens to our digital footprint after we pass and have written about it.

This is such a new area that will require a rethinking in many areas in the future. I believe people should have their digital legacy wishes outlined in their wills. I feel that a digital legacy will provide so much more for future generations to learn about their family and heritage. All I have to remember my grandparents are a few photos and stories told by my parents. I’d love to be able to browse and search their digital legacies to learn more about them.

I can also see an opportunity for changes in businesses such as funeral homes and cemeteries. The digital legacies could be used for family members to help share a life at a memorial and cemeteries could also offer kiosks that provide the digital legacy for people to view. I see many changes and innovations that will result around this area in the future.

In January I came across this great story on “Cyberspace When You’re Dead” in the New York Times. I highly recommend reading this article as it’s enlightening and leads to many questions you may not have considered about all the digital data you’re creating. If you’re young then creating a will isn’t probably something you’ve done, but if you’re getting older, then having a plan on what your wishes are around your digital data is something you should be thinking about. Along with your wishes you should have a method planned to hand over all the account information as well as passwords to access them and keep that up to date.

In Adam’s talk he references the post by Derek K. Miller which he prepared to be published after he passed. He also mentions a service called 1000 memories which is designed so that we can create memorial tribute sites for others after they die. Along with that I mentioned in my comment how digital data can play a big role providing information for future generations that was impossible to do easily for previous generations. So along with determining our wishes within wills and ways to provide archives of this information, there are many considerations we need to be making as we plan for the inevitable which is always something we tend to put off. I see so many new business opportunities that could arise from this. In the meantime, here’s a helpful post on Lifehacker that should provide some guidance for being prepared.

Here’s Adam’s TED talk

Wired's Where Should I Post My Photos Online Flowchart? click image to view on wired.com

Back in October of this year I wrote about this very topic

From the post

I have an ever evolving dynamic workflow diagram that I run through in my head before I decide my path to posting something. For example lets say I want to post a photo online. This may get a bit wacky so try to stay with me. First off I need to determine what tool I will use to post the photo. The tool will differ depending whether I’m on my computer or using a mobile phone. On my desktop I may use Tweetdeck or email or Flickr uploader but before I can choose the tool I need to determine ultimately what type of photo I’m posting. If I just want to share something in the moment and really don’t care about archiving the share (I call these disposable photos) I will use Twitpic and just post to Twitter. If I want to share the photo across several services such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed I will email using Posterous for their autoposting functionality. If the photo is something I really like and want to share and archive I will most likely post that to Flickr. Then even beyond these decisions I have edge cases such as posting food in which I may use Foodspotting and cases where I wanted the location to be a focus and used Brightkite. I could go on, but I think you might get the point.

You can read the full post here. Since then my workflow has gotten much better and I’m primarily using Picplz for most photos and selectively choosing which services to syndicate the photos to (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr) at the point of posting depending on the type of photo and who I want to share it with. Secondarily I use any number of other services like Twitpic, yfrog, and the like for “disposable” images which are usually screenshots or other images that aren’t created by me, or don’t make sense to post to a photo sharing service.

Anyways, as many of you will agree the Wired piece makes us laugh…but it’s that nervous laughter, the kind you undeniably know is funny but also know affects you adversely at the same time.

The one trend I was excited to find of course was on Lifestreaming. If you go to slide 22 they have a section titled “Discovering Lifestreams“. Naturally I was very curious to see what they had to say.

Here’s their predictions dissected by me:

What if you could never miss amoment, never forget a thing -throughout your life? 2011 will see the emergence of this powerful new idea within consumer expectations, and services that combine to make it a reality.

I hope they’re right but I don’t think it will happen in 2011. I’ve been waiting 4 years for it to crack the mainstream and I think we’re still another couple of years out (see last paragraph).

In 2011 we will see increasing numbers of people uploading aspects of their life to the cloud. They’ll be able to combine this across multiple online services, generating meaning from data already online.

I fully agree with this sentiment. I feel that if services can demonstrate to users the value of sharing their data with others (2nd to last paragraph) to develop compelling functionality based on mashing up and analyzing it, they will draw in more users and possibly capture the mainstream. Currently we’re seeing this most notably happening with social content readers which seem to be sprouting up every week.

Existing services will aggregate and combine to offer users new ways to index their digital lives. The raw materials are already there: take a user’s Facebook status updates, twitter updates, digital photos, blog posts, Foursquare checkins, text messages, emails, transactions, YouTube video uploads and credit card statements, and you would have a very complete picture of their existence.

Hmmm, they show Memolane in their example which is a nice service, but sadly it was one of the few created last year and I don’t think we will see many new Lifestreaming services in 2011. FriendFeed was purchased by Facebook in 2009 and languishes now. Cliqset was also recently shut down in December of 2010. I feel these were two of the best and furthermore I’ve seen a huge decline in services created over the last 2 years. Unfortunately there hasn’t been good opportunities for startups to gain mainstream traction or monetize these services.

Additionally, we’ll find specialist LifeLogging services will continue to launch and enjoy wider take up in 2011. These services will also influence the mainstream as users become increasingly concerned about the power of social networks to reveal their personal histories.

Yes, I think Lifelogging which I wrote about last year is one of the niche areas of Lifestreaming that will take off in 2011.

Our children will learn a lot more about us than we did through a few old photographs – but we’ll need to ask ourselves if that’s a good thing. And there’s currently no service or standard to support this kind of reflective exercise on users’ online data.

Well Activity Streams aims to be a standard for this data. I’ve also said before and would argue that having my great great grandchildren learn about me through my Lifestream (see #4) would provide an amazingly better insight into who I was over viewing just photo albums.

Fjord believes specialised lifestream services will grow in 2011 as banks, health institutions and others start to provide the outputs that can be “mashed up” into lifestreams.

I hope Fjord is right. Of course even though I’m a bit of a pessimist now on usage and adoption, I’m still Lifestreaming’s biggest chearleader.

Here’s Fjord’s full list of trends for 2011

David Gelernter © Getty Images

At the recent DLD conference Johannes Kuhn conducted an interview with creator of the Lifestream concept David Galernter. The topic of the discussion was the future of interfaces and the lack of ambition in the use of our current technologies. This is a pretty long interview that goes on for over 30 minutes. It covers many interesting areas including Lifestreaming. Naturally I wanted to focus on and share that area of the discussion here.

From the interview:

sueddeutsche.de: Talking about your idea, because your concept of lifestream which you alluded to a lot of times…the platform that comes closest to it of course is Facebook, at the same time they do well with the proprietary structure, why should they change it?

Gelernter: That’s exactly what I would say if I was Facebook. I would say “I have lots of money, I will make all the rules”, but for me, for a member of the public who says “I am not willing to worry about what’s posted on Facebook” if I am also interested in AOL or Myspace’s, other social network sites, I might also have a Gmail-account or another kind of netmail, if I also have a phone service which provides its own communications format or if I use Skype over the internet.

Facebook is making huge amounts of money, I don’t expect Facebook to say “Let’s change”, it has a lifestream in it, it has a lot of other stuff in it. If I was Facebook I wouldn’t change, they are making lots of money. The impulse doesn’t come from inside these companies, it comes from outside.

sueddeutsche.de: Where do you see developments that go in the right direction that we could actually see in the next twelve months? Or do you think that is a long-time thing that is going to take a bit longer.

Gelernter: I think within the next twelve months we might see some clarity. I think as we see more and more streams, lifestreams, event streams, feeds, activity streams, the Facebook Wall, Chatter that was described by Salesforce yesterday, these are all the same things, lifestreams.

I think we will see clarity that there are two different ways to arrange things on the web: By space – I scatter them across a website, some’s here and some’s here, or like desktop, an icon is here, an icon is there [points on the different parts of the table, editors note] or I arrange it by time, telling a story: This is what happened this morning, and then five minutes later this happened, an hour later this happened. I think there will start to be clarity that these are the two basic systems.

We need them both, so what we need is to think about an optimal way to do the spacial arrangement, an optimal way to do the narrative arrangement, so we can have one storytelling narrative arrangement not ten different incompatible ones.

So we can have one principle of arranging things in space, not HTML for websites and applets for Smartphones and desktops for computers. I don’t think anything is going to change in implementation-terms, I think the industry and the community will see more clearly these are the big categories: space and time. Let’s think about the best way to do each one. I think that could happen.

sueddeutsche.de: That means we have to rethink the whole website or is it you have to think beyond it and really imagine the internet like it’s everywhere, your lifestream can be everywhere, in your fingertips?

Gelernter: That’s very much it. The lifestream is not on the web, it is everywhere, it is in the cloud, it is distributed. I think nobody has to take down his website today, the modern history of software is that new stuff absorbs old stuff.

So in fact we don’t lose our investment, it is still there, but we build new stuff that is simpler and more powerful and that includes the special cases. So we move from complexity to simplicity, keep the complex thing but we add simpler layers as we understand better and more clearly.

You can read the full interview here and there’s also an audio version.

It’s always interesting to listen to David Galernter’s view on Lifestreaming. I can appreciate his holistic approach to the concept but I focus on how it will be applied primarily to web services and related devices. I’m not as optimistic as he is regarding the speed and clarity we’ll see from web services or other systems built on Lifestream data. I’ve been watching this very closely for almost 4 years. I feel the heightened interest in Lifestreaming related services has significantly subsided from the attention of startups, VC’s, and the public.  This has been due to many factors including privacy concerns, difficulty level, user adoption, and lack of monetization strategies for startups that entered the field. Not to mention that most users are now dialing back the services they use and mainly focusing on Facebook and Twitter.

That being said I think we will see a resurgence in Lifestreaming and related services in the future but this will be primarily fueled by 2 things. The value people will begin to discover by sharing Lifestream data and the increasing devices and services that will sprout up around Lifelogging. In the early days (around 2007) of Lifestreaming tools and services being released many argued that Lifestreaming took a pretty large investment to create, while for the most part not many people were interested in viewing others Lifestreams. I always argued that services needed to be built to take advantage of aggregating and analyzing this data in meaningful ways to provide users with value. This is now starting to happen in a big way with social content readers where we are having our news filtered and delivered based on a select peer groups. More recommendation services built arround our selected friends that work similarly should be coming in the near futures as well.

With regards to Lifelogging I am seeing a multitude of dedicated devices and smartphone apps that track all sorts of personal data around exercise, sleep, weight, health, etc. As these devices become better, cheaper, and the data collected starts providing large benefits to improving our lives, we will see adoption of them start to surge. I think these two areas show not only the ways that Lifestreaming could recapture the interest of users, but also provide good monetization options for startups. I don’t often make predictions but I see this starting to happen between the next 1-3 years. Hopefully I’m proven wrong but I think people are currently too distracted by Q & A services, local deals, and location services. But in time those shiny objects will make way for new ones.

For instance Flipboard is one of my favorite apps on the iPad. Its ability to provide deep integration with Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader is nice. So for instance I have the ability to isolate the importing of specific Facebook pages, or Twitter lists, or Google Reader folders, but when I go to read these, Flipboard always shows me the most recent items from the last time it refreshed. I would like to see logic in place so that Flipboard could determine how to prioritize the content to show me. I will often read Flipboard in bed at the same time every night. In the new frenetic online world where we are trying to optimize our time and reduce noise, only offering to show me the most recent content isn’t good enough.

So what are some of the ways we can improve this? Well I’m already filtering the content I want to see based on only displaying items from the people I follow with regards to Facebook and Twitter shared links. But to make sure that I’m also viewing the best items daily from this subset of data we need to sort it using a method other than recency. So for Twitter I’d like it to show me the links shared by those I follow sorted from most to least just like I get in Tweeted Times. For Google Reader I’d like to see items sorted by the most shares/likes from the people I follow. Facebook could sort by mutual shares or quantity of likes and comments. In any case these methods would provide a better way to provide a “best of day” as opposed to just the most recent updates. Lastly, besides logic behind the sorting I’d also like to see content types displayed in separate sections. So you could have photos, videos, and even music within dedicated sections of this reader. So why isn’t there a service or app that does this yet? I have no idea but I’m starting so see some glimpses of hope that such a reader will emerge.

Last week I started playing with two new entrants that show signs of trying to tackle improving the social content reader. Trunk.ly is a service that aims to passively collect all of your shared links across several services. Currently they support Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Pinboard, and RSS feeds. After you’ve linked up your sources you will now get a page that displays all of the links you’ve shared on each of the respective services. So in the case of Twitter and Facebook all of our status update ramblings without links are omitted. Then as you follow other users on the service you get a page of all the most recent links they’ve shared. So far so good, but the feature that then struck me as cool is that alongside page that displays friends share links there is a counter that shows how many other users on the service also shared that link. The problem is that you can’t sort by this data or have access to a best of day based on it. Clicking on the share counter and seeing other users who shared the same link also acts as a great discovery tool to find other good link curators. One limitation of using a separate service such as Trunk.ly though is that I need all the people whose links I want see to use this service. If they offer a way to import the links of those you follow it would be great but I’m not sure that’s withing the scope of their roadmap. However, with RSS support you could get tricky and build some aggregated feeds and import them as an option. You can read some more about Trunk.ly at ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM.

Newsmix was another app announcement last week that got me excited. Billed as a similar app to Flipboard, it was some of the differences I focused on. You can import your Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader data although not as granularly as Flipboard. The user interface is very nice and similar to Flipboard, but it has some distinctions which include features I’ve been looking for in social content readers. Unlike Flipboard, the imported data doesn’t reside in a section defined by the source. They instead create sections based on the content type. So there’s a sports, technology, news, and several other content types. I’m not sure what logic they use to categorize the data and there are definitely missteps here, but it’s an interesting change with regards to organizing content. They also provide separate dedicated sections for photos and videos. They do a nice job here filtering links and shared photos to be displayed in this section.  They also have a top news section which I’m not sure how it’s determined and only supports 3 items at the moment, but could be a useful section. You can read more about Newsmix at TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb.

Since Newsmix costs $2.99 I thought I’d record a quick video demo showing the features I discuss above:

So while the concepts I’ve described for what I’d like to see in a future social content reader aren’t yet met by these two services, signs of these new features starting to appear is a step in the right direction. There are also many other services and apps, each using their own logic and display methods in the social content reader space including the already mentioned Tweeted Times, Paper.li, Cadmus and mobile/tablet apps Flipboard, Pulse,  My6Sense and Cascaad. If you want to learn more about how relevance has become the holy grail of filtering our content go read this post by Mahendra Palsule. I’ll continue to monitor developments in this area and share what I find here.

I wrote about Backtype entering the influence scoring game a few weeks ago. Aside from them entering this highly competitive service landscape, they offer pretty nice usage information for users. They display a stat dashboard with percentages to quickly determine what type of user someone is. I found this to be a very useful tool. For instance if you see that someone has a large percentage of updates and @replies then they primarily use the service as a communicator, someone who’s highest percentage is links is probably more of a curator, while someone who primarily retweets is a sharer.

Mark is a talker and curator, Calvin is very balanced, Francisco is a communicator.

There are several good uses for this data. Perhaps you’re not happy with the type of user you’ve become on the service and want to change your behavior. Maybe having learned what type of user you are, you might want to find ways to gravitate towards similar users. It would be so nice to have this stat dashboard as part of the new follower notification emails to help decide if you want to follow someone back. It could also be useful if you want to spend some time pruning your follower list. I’d love to see this feature integrated in ways like that. Perhaps something already does but either I haven’t found it, or it doesn’t offer a simple elegant approach like Backtype provides.

So you want to find out what type of Twitter user you are? Visit Backtype and enter your Twitter username preceeded by an @ symbol. So for me it’s @krynsky.

My thoughts on this were rekindled yesterday when I saw the poignant video A Life on Facebook below:

We are still spending so much time just making sense of how to improve the creation and filter the consumption of our digital lives being published online that nobody seems to be tackling how we can package the information to share with our grandchildren. I’m hoping as social services evolve that serious thought will be put into making preservation a goal in the future.

Yesterday I wrote a blog post and over time I watched some activity surrounding it on Twitter. There was one tweet from Jesse Newhart that also got retweeted by 3 other folks, all of which have some significant influence according to Klout.

So what’s the problem here? None of this activity will affect my Klout score. While the secret sauce to Klout’s algorithm isn’t public, we know that they factor retweets in the scoring. But a tweet needs to have the originator’s @ referenced within it for any inclusion in the scoring. So as far as Klout is concerned these actions around my blog post are invisible. Making some assumptions about the tweet example above, Jesse Newhart will gain some influence scoring whereas I (the creator of the content that Jesse shared) would gain none. I gave this some thought and it elicited all kinds of issues around user activity that Klout is missing as well as trying to determine how a service like them could go about including it.

While Twitter is a great service and definitely has its place as a factor in calculating influence, there are so many other factors that need consideration. Blogging is a social media activity that arguably should garner a larger level of influence over a tweet if measured in a similar fashion. So I started to ask myself what metrics could be used to calculate blogger scoring and how could a service like Klout incorporate this information into their scoring?

My influence summary on Klout

So I started to do a brain dump on some ways that you could aggregate some data points from third party metrics to try and create an influence score for blogging. There are quite a few ways that this could be done.

• RSS Subscribers – Feedburner
• Blog Traffic – Quantcast, Google Analytics
• Comment Activity – Disqus, Echo, Intense Debate
• Social Media Activity – Postrank, Sharethis, Bitly, Tweetmeme, Facebook

The numbers generated around the above activities provided by the third party services could be used to provide a blogger influence score. For Klout to implement this they would need to somehow allow their users to claim blogs and associate them with their accounts or perhaps the data could be inherited by partnering with some of the above services.

Today I saw a blog post on the Top 10 Most Influential Independent PR Bloggers on Twitter. This top 10 list ranked PR bloggers calculated only using their Klout scores.  I’m curious how these rankings would have been affected by using the blog activity metrics I list above? This list is a prime example of why only using a Klout score for ranking is troublesome and I’ve seen similar ones.

I would love to see a blogger score metric used as a calculation in a person’s influence. In fact I personally would put more weight behind this value in an overall influence score. Other areas of the Klout summary could benefit from this data as well including the topic summary to paint a better picture about a users knowledge. We are still in the early stages of measuring and determining influence. Using data to help calculate it is tricky, but I don’t feel the full story is being told and I’m looking forward to watching tools and services evolve in this area.

UPDATE: After reading the comment from Mahendra Palsule below I read his posts and testing out Peerindex. I started to type a reply but it grew to become more useful as an update

I went ahead and read both (post 1 & post 2) of your blog posts that provide insight into their service. I then also read about how they calculate their scores. Unfortunately as you’ve stated, although they let you add your blogs, they don’t currently seem to factor any of its metrics into their calculations.

Also, aside from their different methodology of ranking influence from Klout, I don’t find their user summary pages to be anywhere near as useful or accurate. When comparing my topics on Peerindex to Klout, I found Klout’s to not only be more accurate but also much more targeted than the broad ones used by Peerindex (Why is Robert Scoble listed as a topic for me?). I’m not sure how Klout calculates this but it appears that it may be based on the frequency of keywords used in the lists I’ve been added to if this service that creates a tag cloud I found a while back is any indication. In any case, it’s more accurate.

Also, the descriptions of how the 3 scores (Authority, Activity, and Audience) are calculated are a bit cryptic. For instance “Too much irrelevant activity can hurt your overall activity score” what is considered irrelevant? Also, “At PeerIndex, we look at the content your share, including the links you recommend, and score it against other members of a given topic.” It doesn’t look like they’re tracking more than a small number of high level topics, what about those that don’t fall into this category?

On Klout they provide some simple insight about some factors on how your score is being calculated with their use of descriptive achievement badges. They also provide even more details regarding people with their Klout classification. So while I don’t deny that Peerindex may take more data into account, ultimately it’s the way you present that data to users that will determine its usefulness. I will continue to follow Peerindex as well to see how they improve the service.