Reflection

It’s been an amazing journey. When I created the blog I truly felt that this concept was something that was going to be huge. Within months of launching the site there was an avalanche of startups launched that aimed to bring Lifestreaming to the masses. I reviewed many of them and over time was contacted by founders to provide feedback and advice. It was an amazing time where you could see the evolution of this concept in various unique implementations. Initially most services only provided aggregation of RSS feeds but as the evolution of the web continued with the proliferation of websites providing API access to their services, we continued to see Lifestreaming services innovate.

Lifestreaming Services Peak

At it’s peak from 2008-2009 we saw the largest number of pure Lifestreaming services emerge. Leading the pack in terms of users and features was FriendFeed. These former Googler’s had created an amazing team who iterated often and created many cutting edge features that led to the creation of a great community. But in the end the service just couldn’t distinguish itself in a way to attract mainstream users to Lifestreaming and the droves of those potential people continued to join Facebook. As FriendFeed continued their mission, you could see new features pop up on Facebook that were heavily borrowing things that were being done on FriendFeed. Eventually FriendFeed saw their userbase become stagnant and in August of 2009 they were acquired by Facebook. In the end it was more about the talent grab as most of the former team were integrated at Facebook. I saw 2009 as the end of the Lifestreaming service goldrush. FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor eventually became CTO at Facebook and I see their recent launch of Timelines as the culmination of many Lifestreaming concepts by the integrated team coming to fruition.

The Evolution

From 2010 to now I have focused on several other areas related to the data we create on social services. I became very interested in how we can glean insight from the data and how we can filter and prioritize the massive amounts generated by the firehose. I became very interested in the growth of social magazine apps which allow us to connect our social accounts and use logic to filter relevant content for us. I’ve also become much more interested in Lifelogging and the Quantified Self. There are an amazing number of devices coming to market to track personal data as it relates to exercise, sleep, nutrition, as well as blood and dna analysis. I feel we’re on the verge of a huge revolution in pro-active and preventative healthcare. The evolution of these devices and services to analyze the data over the next few years will be amazing.

The Future

So what’s next here at Lifestream Blog? Well, I’ll continue to focus on what I mentioned in the previous paragraph and continue to bring insights and tips regarding social services and data. I also just got back from SXSW and saw a panel titled “Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death“. I’ve written about the aspects of Lifestreaming and death before but the panel really inspired me to give this much more thought. I plan on creating a new section here on the site soon where I’ll provide tips on the preservation, preparation and archival of our digital lives. I also will continue to monitor advancements in this area and report what I find. I feel that providing a digital legacy of our lives for both our family and future generations is critically important.

Giving Thanks

So that’s my update folks. I can’t begin to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed sharing my thoughts and discoveries here with you. I truly appreciate all of the readers that have visited over the years. You’ve provided great feedback and in many cases friendships were born from here. I never realized what a powerful vehicle this blog would become. I urge any of you that have a passion in life to create a blog and share your thoughts and resources with others. It will truly bring you amazing things!

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.

Facebook Timelines

There have been many ways of providing a presentation layer for a Lifestream. Early on most methods didn’t provide access to the long tail for a person’s posts. I wanted to see a calendar (or timeline) view to make a Lifestream become more of a historical record of the past. Several services started to pop up using the Timeline method and thus this digital diary metaphor was born. I believe it’s the most compelling form of Lifestreaming for an individual to be driven to create one. Providing the feature using a simple interface in a dominant social network has now brought this to the masses. I like to think that the knowledge gained by the FriendFeed talent acquisition is what helped propel Facebook to do this…and here we are.

During the early days of Lifestreaming there were many debates regarding its value. Initially services tried to become the hub of Lifestreaming activity and it was a bit difficult to realize the ways that content discovery would eventually become the catalyst driving so many people to do it. But over time the proliferation of API’s would bring about more sophisticated ways to take lifestreaming data and provide both great function and beautiful design. We now have many apps that are built on the backs of the Lifestreaming data people share across multiple services. We have social reader apps that aggregate the links we share on social networks, sometimes with some logic to prioritize the viewing order, and beautiful visual ways to display them.

The passive (aka frictionless) method of sharing was made popular this year by having the stream of our music listening habits from Spotify populate our Facebook Timeline. We’ve actually been doing this since 2008 by scrobbling from last.fm but only now is it a big deal as it hits the mainstream. Passive sharing is just starting to scratch the surface of where it’s going. It will become much more prevalent and start automating many of the updates to our Lifestreams.

Most passive sharing actions will come from apps on our mobile phones (soon with NFC) connected to our Lifestream. Path was another new entrant in the Lifestreaming arena with their revamped app release this year. The new version took steps to add passive sharing by posting updates in the background to our timelines based on monitoring our geographical location on our phones. Theoretically they could also monitor the audio to passively share our TV or movie viewing using Intonow technology. We will also see passive sharing coming from the stats behind our workouts, sleeping patterns, weight, and many other health based stats to Lifestreams coming from the growing popularity of Lifelogging devices. These devices will see huge growth as monitoring this data will provide health benefits including added motivation by sharing information socially.

As we move into 2012 it will be interesting to see how the Facebook Timeline evolves with many more third party apps populating it with data. I think the jury is still out on whether the Timeline will be a success depending on the usage and adoption. However, I am bullish on more innovation with mobile apps like Path coming and a new breed of services being launched to aggregate the health data generated from all these new lifelogging devices. It should be quite an interesting year as the Lifestreaming concept continues to reshape itself in line with advancements in technology. As always, I’m looking forward to watching it and sharing my findings with you here.

image of David Gelernter courtesy of Read Write Web

From the article

Eventually business models based on streaming will dominate the Internet, he predicts. All the world’s data will be presented as a “worldstream,” some of it public, most of it proprietary, available only to authorized users. Web browsers will become stream browsers. Users will become comfortably accustomed to tracking and manipulating their digital objects as streams rather than as files in a file system. The stream will become a mirror of the unfolding story of their lives.

“I can visualize the worldstream,” says Mr. Gelernter, explaining its advantages. “I know what it looks like. I know what my chunk of it looks like. When I focus on my stuff, I get a stream that is a subset of the worldstream.

I too have often thought the business opportunities that could be built around the data generated by Lifestreaming. But we’re still in a phase of getting people to feel comfortable lifestreaming and developing methods to effectively tag and store the data. Facebook is trying to do this with the introduction of the timeline. They’re also trying to effectively catalog this detailed data with the development of the open graph. As lifestreaming and the resulting data becomes more ubiquitous, we should see these services start to come online. This could include vertical based lifestreams such as quantified self personal activity tracking (read paragraph 6 of this post)

In the article we also come to find out that David Gelernter and his son Daniel have created a new company. They’ve started to seek funding to create a product to bring Lifestreaming to the iPad.

From the article

The new venture, for which Mr. Gelernter is just beginning to seek funding, will focus on developing a lifestream product for the Apple iPad. “We like the pad,” he says. “A particular goal is to create a lifestream which aggregates the most popular social network streams, and includes email and stuff like that. It will generate revenues the way Twitter and Facebook do—by getting huge numbers of users, beginning at the place we know, Yale University undergraduates, who love glitzy new software. They tell their parents, who are big shots because their kids are students at Yale.” The new product will spread virally, forming a vast audience that can be sold to advertisers.

This is interesting. Entering the crowded world of lifestreaming apps and services will be very challenging at this stage of the game. I’m very curious to see what David Gelernter will bring to the table to distinguish this product from the rest of the pack.  I look forward to monitoring this and bringing you more news as I discover it.

The “timeline” approach to Lifestreaming, and there have been many different approaches, became pretty popular with several services over the last few years. Recently, Memolane has emerged as one of the more popular ones and very recently I reviewed Glossi which is very nice as well. I liked the timeline approaches but wanted a little more and wrote about wanting a calendar based UI for Lifestreaming in 2009. It’s pretty funny that my mockup for that post used FriendFeed as an example which eventually got bought by Facebook and made co-founder Brett Taylor their CTO, but I digress.

Timeline brings Lifestreaming to Facebook

So what are my thoughts on Facebook’s Timeline? Well I think they’ve done a great job building it to visualize our posts and milestones over the years. It also seems that there will be apps that will allow us to segregate sections of it to focus on specific actions such as music, books and movies. I’m a fan of the segregated content approach and Flavors.me is my favorite site in this area. All of that said, I feel that they should have provided timeline as a supplemental view to our existing profiles and not a replacement. The simplicity and consistent experience of viewing the newsfeed when you visit a users profile will soon be gone. Status updates will now begin much further down on profiles pretty much “below the fold”. As we see more custom apps to publish content as boxes in the timeline, you will see a very diverse experience when travelling from profile to profile. 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.

Two other announcements that will have huge implications are the Open Graph and Ticker initiatives. Open Graph will take “Liking” things to a whole new level with the introduction of additional actions that will now appear potentially both on your newsfeed as well as the newly introduced real-time Ticker. So you will be able to share new actions such as “read” a “book”, or “watched” a “movie”. I feel this is a great expansion on the limited nature and context of what “liking” something offered which I wrote about last year in my post on the evolution of likes as social gestures which hinted at the future we are about to see come to fruition.

An interesting aspect of this is that up until now you’ve explicitly shared information by clicking on the like, share, or recommend buttons on Facebook or other websites. Louis Gray wrote a post describing the value of user behavior in regards to explicitly sharing selective content on social networks.  His post questions whether the noise and minutiae of implicit sharing is of any value. As an example users may currently use a service like Getglue or Miso to selectively share tv shows or movies they watch. But in that example you choose what viewing you want to share. Now developers will be modifying or releasing new apps that can take your actions that are occurring natively within a service and automatically share them on Facebook.  So for example a modified Facebook app by Netflix they will add the ability to automatically post everything you watch on the service on Facebook.

I have some mixed feelings about how implicit gestures may get integrated into Facebook. I think it depends on several factors including:

• Can people get value from it?
• Can they control it?
• Can the resulting content be hidden easily?

Let me answer these points…

real-time posting of songs I listen to on Last.fm

I’m fine with automatically sharing all the music I listen to in real-time because I’ve been doing this already for years scrobbling to Last.fm. For my following example implicit sharing means giving an app or service authorization to continually post an open graph verb / noun combination passively in the background for you while you’re using it. In the case of a music service this becomes “listened” to “song”. The value I’ve gotten from this implicit action is being able to discover new music from my friends that have also been doing it. Facebook is taking scrobbling to a whole new level by aggregating users real-time listening across multiple streaming music services including Spotify, Rdio, Mog, and others directly to the Facebook ticker. The Facebook ticker has been added to the chat sidebar and can easily be hidden away. So in this scenario I think implicit sharing and the method Facebook has implemented it is a good thing on the service.

I do however think that Facebook will run into problems with how developers implement implicit sharing on Facebook using the open graph. My example above is one that I think many people will enjoy and has very few implications from a privacy standpoint other than exposing your crappy music taste to friends. There will be other instances where this will not be the case. My guess is that the process for authorization of apps that leverage the open graph will be in the form of an additional item on the standard Facebook permissions dialog box which people will glance over in the same way they currently check TOS boxes without reading them.  Most people won’t realize that they’ve authorized the implicit sharing to the ticker from apps they grant permission to and we will no doubt hear some horror stories from this in the future.

Chris Saad wrote an analysis of Timeline, Ticker and Open Graph. It generated an interesting conversation over on Google+ that I participated in. His post poses several interesting questions including whether other services will implement similar strategies, whether independent websites will also try to gather their users data in the same ways Facebook now will. He also mentions that Facebook has essentially re-launched the much lauded Beacon product with the release of these features. While Beacon was squarely aimed at creating and leveraging user data for targeted ads, these new features weren’t described to resurrect that…yet. I did however go read up on Beacon a bit to refresh my memory and found this interesting blog post from Zuckerberg apologizing for the Beacon missteps and in it he stated “People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, [and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don't want to use it.]” I have a feeling that with the open graph’s method of implementation Mark will be challenged on this point once again.

I tested out the app and it does a pretty good job. It created 11 groups for me. Some where based on some simple logic such as creating them based on co-workers from specific companies or from students of the same school as myself, or based on location. But there were a few groups that look to have been created based on my interactions with those users on Facebook. That’s the area that is of most interest to me. In this world of “friendships” that far exceed the Dunbar number and with an ever increasing number of items people are sharing on a daily basis, we need to find better ways to filter it. This is an ongoing problem that many companies are trying to solve using many different methods.

While I like to participate on social networks I realize that I can’t possibly see all the content shared by my friends on a daily basis. That’s why I’ve come to rely on several different social reader apps that use logic to find the most popular or shared items across them for me. I wrote a post where I compared several of them and continue to focus on this area. Currently one of my favorites is Tweeted Times which prioritizes links shared on Twitter based on the number of people whom I follow have shared. This is updated every few hours and you can see my current page here.

While this method is pretty good there is a ton of other data based on my Twitter behavior that could be used to improve it. For instance it would be great if based on my behavior a ranking could be created for the people I follow on Twitter. So lets say that every time I RT or @reply or favorite a tweet that increased the ranking of the user who’s tweet that behavior was directed to. Similar behaviors could be applied to users of other networks. For instance if I liked, or shared or commented on a YouTube video. I recently was on the Tummelvision podcast and on there discussed how Klout is great for doing a global ranking and I can see the usefulness of that in some perspectives, but that ranking doesn’t translate to each of us as individuals. What I’m proposing is that we each have our own unique ranking for people in our social graphs based on our behaviors and interactions with them across multiple networks. If there could be a way to harness that so it could be applied to social content readers or help us to share selectively with much better intelligence, we could each truly have a dynamic personalized experience tailor made for each of us.

Based on what I read about Katango over at TechCrunch. They have their eyes on a much bigger prize than this trivial Facebook grouping app they just released.

From TechCrunch

But the iPhone app launching today is really a proving ground for the technology. Eventually Katango plans to let other services and apps tap into its algorithms, allowing them to integrate its auto-grouping functionality (this wouldn’t be a purely benevolent move, either — Katango would also be able to improve its algorithms from that additional data). And the Katango will eventually be on other platforms, like Android, and a web-based version of the app. Katango is tackling an immensely challenging problem, but if they get it right, the resulting engine would be invaluable.

I also read over on AllThingsD that they plan to add support for Twitter and LinkedIn as well in the future. Lastly you can get some more insight from Louis Gray who spent some time at their offices and also wrote a great review here.

Between the sudden surge in apps and services that are trying to identify personalized content for us and the emergence of services like Katango to make better sense of how we filter, share, and interact with slices of our social graph, I think we will truly start to see some major innovations in helping us sift through all these needles in the haystacks.

You may not believe me when I say this, but I’m happy that Google+ doesn’t offer the ability to import and aggregate content from 3rd party services. My personal stance on this has changed quite a bit over the years. During the early days of Lifestreaming I would pick a single service for a specific content type (i.e. Flickr for photos) and import all the data I created there into my Lifestreaming software or service. As time went on I realized that an all or nothing approach with regards to importing content didn’t make sense. There were times were I might generate multiple versions of the same content on a Lifestreaming service. For instance I would bookmark a page on Delicious as well as share it on Twitter and in both cases that same link appeared in my Lifestream because I was importing all content generated from both services. There were many other ways that these duplicates would occur.

from the 5 Good Examples for Managing Your Lifestreaming Data Flow post

I’ve written several posts on this subject including the crazy flowcharts we go through when deciding to post a photo, highlighting the examples of people’s workflows when it comes to posting content, and even coming to the realization that I’ve become neurotic when it comes to determining how and where to post content. I finally decided stop being a content pollutant. In my case I decided to take a step back and do a social inventory of how and where I was sharing content. There were several facets to this but the theme behind most of them was to remove automated importing or synchronization of content between services where they didn’t make sense. For instance I at one time had sync’d my Twitter account to Facebook so that every tweet would appear there. I originally treated Facebook much like FriendFeed and figured I’d just make sure to post my status updates there as well. As time went on more of my non-tech friends and family joined the service and then it became clear that I was just some noisy person saying things that weren’t really relevant to most of them not to mention that much of Twitter’s usage is of different context to Facebook updates.

So what have been some of my new strategies with regards to Lifestreaming? Well there’s been a few changes I’ve implemented with regards to how I go about creating and sharing. For a very long time I was using the WordPress Lifestream plugin to do the traditional reverse chronological aggregation of all imported content for the Lifestream on my personal blog. I still think this is great to use for a personal basis for digitally archiving our lives, but don’t think it offers a good external facing option for other people based on many of the examples I’ve given. While I continue to test and use several services I currently point my personal blog to Flavors.me for my Lifestream. I feel that they provide a visually compelling way to display my lifestream that is also segregated by content type which makes navigation for people with selective interests easier and avoids noisy duplication.

Another strategy I’ve really become a fan of is selective syndication of content. I became a fan of this originally using Posterous for photos using email as well as their bookmarklet for sharing links but it was a bit cumbersome and I’ve since abandoned that method. Currently my favorite example of selective syndication is in the method used by Instagram and PicPlz. I like that I can easily determine what 3rd party services I want to share every photo I add to their service. To keep things simple my strategy is to try and find a single source for each content type that offers the options to syndicate to all the other services/communities I want I’m a member of.

So this finally brings me to Google+. People are congregating over there in a voracious fashion right now. There are many reasons why this is happening. It’s a highly anticipated launch from Google, it’s got that velvet rope going for it with limited users on the service, it’s created a new top 100 user list which is fodder for any new social service before the mainstream and celebs arrive, and several other similar reasons. Some of the distinctions I’ve found about the service which make it unique are the hangouts (video group chatting with YouTube sharing included), Circles (a way to filter users and shared content), and export features (you can export everything which is a shot at Facebook)

Right now I hear many people saying that they’re happy that you can’t import content from other services (which as you read I agree) and that it’s a pristine network where people have to manually share content and there are many realtime conversations that are spawning from that which is no doubt the big attraction right now. But it won’t be long before the floodgates open when everyone joins the service, the API gets released, and pretty soon it will become another social network dumping ground.  So you say Circles alleviates that right? Well not necessarily. The unique value of circles is in its ability to let us selectively share content with predefined groups but from a data consumption standpoint it’s no different than Twitter lists or Facebook lists. You may label me or other users as tech but not all of my posts will be tech related. All users have different methods for how they will choose to sync accounts, selectively syndicate, or balance the topics of their posts. This will not change on this service. So while I like to dip in and check the status of friends posts and interact I now rely more on the social magazine content readers to filter and prioritize all the news the people I follow are sharing.

Anyways, I’m a big fan of Google+ and have really enjoyed the service so far I really look forward to watching it open up and evolve. If it gains adoption and a large user base, I hope they quickly add support from third party services to syndicate there, as a service to be added to social content readers, some unique mobile apps, and all the other goodies we expect a top tier social network to offer. If you want to friend up you can find me here.

After you watch your gallery you can share images created from it on your Facebook profile. Unfortunately, you can’t share the flash videos created which is a major bummer. In face you have to manually go back to the original URL after playback if you want to watch it again. Based on how the museum shows a timestamp and uses recent content, I’m guessing you can come back later in the future to create a new experience if Intel leaves it up.  In any event, it’s worth the time to try it out.

Create your own museum of me here.

For background, Turntable.fm is a social music discovery platform. Arrive on the site, choose a room to enter based on your musical interest and find yourself in a virtual club – with DJs on stage and other users milling about listening to the tunes. Everyone in the room has an avatar and can chat with each other. Users create their own playlist and then can get up on the DJ table to play their tracks.

You can read the full post titled “The Magic of Turntable.fm (or the real Social Web)“. What’s interesting is that Adam also saw the magic and potential of the service from a higher level view as did I and wrote about it. He goes on to say “Turntable.fm creates a very unique social experience that I think points to the next generation of the social web”. I suspect others will as well and Turntable.fm may end up being the catalyst to fuel a new range of services modeled after it. Let me explain this further.

Rockin' out in the Coding Soundtrack room on Turntable.fm

While the concept seems fairly simple on the surface, it provides one of those unique online experiences that makes you take notice. At a high level I think the magic that Turntable.fm provides lies in providing a unique and rich real-time synchronous experience around a given object. The basic premise of interacting with other users live using chat has been one of the most powerful experiences since the beginning of online communication. Whether it was the multi-channel BBS’s back in the day, or chat rooms on Compuserve and AOL, or even later channels on IRC. These all provided a tribal experience that always felt exciting and real. On Twitter we now join conversations around hashtags. On uStream, Livestream and other live video sites we may chat around a given broadcast. Even MMORPG’s provide a free-form way to interact online with friends. But I feel there are still opportunities around creating innovation around a guided experience for users to interact online.

With all the powerful tools and functionality at our disposal we really haven’t seen much innovation around this area on the web. In my few days of playing with Turntable.fm it has opened my mind to the possibilities of creating real-time user experiences around guided functionality. Thinking of how to improve Turntable.fm made me consider even broader methods of building a platform to launch sites using the underlying functionality to power other ideas. One idea I had was to create a site to provide a real-time mashup of Tumblr and an Ignite talk. Imagine taking one of the open spots on the stage and then queuing up an object just like you would by creating a post on Tumblr. So in this case, instead of adding a song you would be adding an object which could be a song, video, photo, or other item you could upload or link to online. You would then have 5 minutes to both talk and interact with the audience around a discussion about the object. Think of it as a powerful online version of show and tell. I have other ideas around building such a platform but I’ll leave those for another day and I’m sure folks can come up with plenty more.

So lets return back to Turntable.fm for a little. Another interesting aspect of the service is how it crosses generations which isn’t easy to do on the social web. Music is a pretty easy way to achieve this and on Friday I hung out with Kevin Marks and his teenage son in a room. I then showed my son who also joined the service and has stopped playing video games this weekend to focus on spinning tunes and accumulating points for the upgraded avatars on the service. I’ve had tons of ideas around features and functionality to greatly improve the site and ultimately could be used to improve future ideas like the one I discuss above. So here’s a bulleted brain dump of them:

• Create more audience involvement. The rooms can feel like a dictatorship with only 5 people deciding what music to play.
• Let the users participate by voting for songs the DJ’s have in their playlist. This would have the DJ’s competing against each other for audience attention.
• Add ability for audience voting to skip a song and set a threshold for it.
• Set time / track limits for DJ’s so they can’t hog the stage.
• Ability to have visuals for the songs (blip.fm also shows videos, last.fm provides artist photo slideshow)
• Provide artist details in a separate pane or link
• Ability for DJ’s to share their tracklists (XPSF export)
• Ability for DJ’s to have multiple track lists
• More gestures besides voting songs “lame” or “awesome” to earn points. Could be associated to providing audience members voting privileges a way to achieve points.
• Create other unique achievements. Unlocking features and functionality seems like a good idea so that rooms can have added features based on DJ’s level of experience
• These are just a few for now…

Achievements on all other services pale in comparison to earning the Turntable.fm Deadmau5 avatar

Anyways, I urge you to check out the service as I think you’ll find it to be pretty fun. All you need to get in is be friends on Facebook with someone already on the service. I have a feeling that the site is going to get a surge of users over the next few weeks. I’m looking forward to continuing using it and watching it evolve. I also hope to see other startups built off the same model in the future as well.

Update 6/9/11: Here’s a great post from Ryan Hoover who along with many other folks seems to also see how the service seems to have captured lighting in a bottle and he provides thoughts on how the service can expand into other areas. Here’s a post by Peter Kafka at All Things Digital on the Legality issues.

This new site provides links to the Github repository, documentation, and the blog. In addition they’ve added a vision statement. It really illuminates the need for the project and sets the tone for why it was formed.

Here it is in its entirety:

Why We’re Doing This

As we go through our lives we create vast amounts of data. Emails, phone calls, social network posts, photos, utility bills, health monitoring devices, text messages, browsing data, purchase receipts and more are all born out of the regular course of our actions. It’s more than just data. It represents our actions, interests, intentions, communications, relationships, locations, behaviors and creative and consumptive efforts.

Currently, our data is scattered everywhere. It lives in and is usually owned by the various networks into which it was created or exchanged. It’s aggregated by third party trackers and targeters looking to deliver advertising, content and services to you. Billions of dollars are exchanged, industries built upon and value created off of our data, and it serves as the basis and is the foundation for some of the largest power structures on the web, and in the world at large.

Meanwhile, the people who have benefited least from this ecosystem are the very people originating the data. Often times, in fact, these channels and organizations go out of their way to limit our ability to extract our data from the network and reuse our own content. Limitless opportunities for engaging personalized applications and web experiences, as well as more free and open communication are lost when this happens.

You can visit the newly launched Locker Project site here.