I have recently decided to seriously spend some time focusing on how to improve my Lifestreaming workflow.  I have found that creating an effective workflow is one of the most challenging aspects of Lifestreaming. I don’t feel my current method is very good and needed to change. There are many variables that will determine your workflow. Which tools & services you use to create content (Flickr, YouTube, iPhone) as well as the networks you post them to (Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter) will dictate many things.

Here are my plans and goals.

• Identify all my current desktop & mobile tools currently used to post content
• Look at how content is currently displayed on the services I’m posting to
• Review my cross-post and sync methods across all my existing services
• Modify the tools or processes currently in place making them more effective and eliminating duplication

So the catalyst for me getting this process started was posting photos from my iPhone. I no longer wanted to use Twitpic. I currently sync my twitter account to Facebook. I want my mobile photos to be displayed as thumbnails in my Facebook feed as opposed to tweets with a Twitpic link. FriendFeed displays the Twitpics fine, but I want the best solution across all services.

I’ve been doing a little research on the various services out there that do cross-posting including Pixelpipe, Ping.fm, and Tarpipe. After some testing I’ve started to experiment with Posterous’ auto-posting features. So far I’m pretty happy but have issues with duplication based on my current workflow.

Steve Rubel’s Lifestreaming Workflow

Then the other day I noticed that Tweets from Steve Rubel are using the FriendFeed short url service yet are linking to his Posterous. So I went back to read his Lifestreaming Workflow post. In it he gave the overview on how he captures, processes, and shares content but not the nitty gritty details. Luckily a commenter posed a question that prompted Steve to provide the details I was looking for.

Steve’s secret sauce

That information helped me understand how he was doing it. I’m not a fan of relying on RSS to get scooped up because I like the immediacy of posting but it got me thinking differently about how to improve my workflow. I’m willing to make sacrifices to my workflow to remove duplicity and RSS is quickly improving around the needs of the real-time web so it may not be an issue in many cases.

Anyways, I will continue testing and improving my workflow and will post the results once I have reached a comfortable process I decide to use. In the meantime I would love to hear about your current methods and possibly include them in my future post. Either leave details in the comments or you can email info to me.

A while back I had read about several Wordpress plugins that offered the ability to customize the viewing of your site for mobile devices. Yesterday I decided to go research the slew of plugins available out there to determine which one to implement. I reduced the field to 2 plugins. The MobilePress plugin and the WP Touch plugin. I liked the straightforward and simple approach offered by MobilePress, but then after playing with WP Touch, I decided that I like the larger number of options and ways to customize the features.

There are many options available for WP Touch Wordpress plugin that make it a great one to offer a clean mobile version for your website. This plugin was designed specifically for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices although it appears other mobile devices are supported. I’m not sure how the site renders on other devices so perhaps you can leave a comment if you try it to let me know. Once enabled, the display of the site on an iPhone looks really clean and offered some nice features. One of those which I really liked was the ability to offer a custom icon which is placed next to the title and can be displayed on your home screen as well for an iPhone or iPod Touch. They provide a link to a great iPhone icon generator which I used to create one for Lifestream Blog. You also have the ability to add more custom icons or choose from a slew of existing ones they provide for each of your sites’ pages that you choose to make available in the navigation.

Also regarding the icon functionality, you can choose which pages you want to make visible in a nice custom dropdown menu available just to the right of the title. You can also offer an RSS feed and link to the email address you setup on the Wordpress admin. The posts have several fields you can choose to display and offer a nice ajax dropdown for each of them that displays an excerpt with a link to view the full post.

One thing you need to make sure is that you follow the steps to properly configure WP Cache or WP Super Cache if you are running either of these plugins so that you’re site works properly. I was running WP Cache and had issues and then finally moved over to WP Super Cache which seems to offer better support for mobile devices.

Here’s screenshots showing the extensive settings available

Here’s a video showing some features on Lifestream Blog on my iPhone

Here’s a list of the notable features listed from the plugin page

• User-selected theme toggle (between WPtouch view and your site’s regular look)
• iPhone-like application appearance, functions
• AJAX, jQuery & effects in only 56kb
• The ability to turn advanced javascript effects & ajax on/off
• Full WordPress search, pages, archives, categories, tags and links support
• Theme native social bookmarking support
• iPhone/iPod touch native post e-mailing support
• Ajax comments, posted in real time
• Ajaxed pagination (users can browse posts like YouTube videos)
• Admin selectable custom icons for pages, logo, bookmark icon
• Manually edit your site’s title to fit WPtouch
• Show / Hide post excerpts, customize style in different ways
• Easily add your own icons to customize menu appearance
• Admin inclusion/exclusion of site pages shown in the theme’s menu
• Compatibility suite in admin to inform of add-ons, WordPress version support
• Favicon fetch & conversion to .png for links displayed using the WP blogroll
• Support for FlickrRSS plugin, Blip.it video plugin
• Automatic Archives page layout (if you have or create a page called ‘Archives’)
• Automatic Photo page layout with Flickr (if you have or create a page called ‘Photos’ and have the FlickrRSS plugin installed)
• Automatic Links page layout with your blogroll links listed with their favicons (if you have or create a page called ‘Links’)

Over the last few months Twitter (or the technology of micro-blogging) has marched its way to penetrate the mainstream and just like any new web technology that does this, we see a much wider base of users and then come the spammers. Even prior to this phenomenon there was a race to gain followers. Many felt that having a large number of followers would equate to being considered an “authority” and that messaging sent by these users would carry more weight. While in some cases that could be true, I feel that this is now more the exception than the rule.

This behavior seems to also have spread to other services  such as FriendFeed and Facebook causing a huge followfest along with the blaring volume of messages that accompany being at a huge party. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but with this new behavior comes the need to find a way to manage how to still effectively listen to the people that matter to you. Luckily there are quite a few tools that allow us to do this fairly effectively by creating lists of people that we can filter by.

For Twitter we luckily have the two most popular tools both supporting lists in Tweetdeck and Seesmic. below I have screenshots of where those lists reside in each of the programs.

(click for larger screenshots of Tweetdeck & Seesmic list functionality)

The same ability to create lists is also available in both FriendFeed and Facebook now as well

(click for larger screenshots of FriendFeed & Facebook list functionality)

This post isn’t to show you how to setup lists in each of these tools but I will provide links to help you at the end of the post. So why am I showing you all of this? Because having a humongous follower count brings with it a tidal wave of data. It is becoming pretty clear that being followed alone isn’t enough anymore. If you want to be heard I think it’s going to become increasingly important to make it onto people’s lists.

A few months back I read a great post by Mike Fruchter titled My State of Social Media. In it Mike talks about the race to gain followers and states that “Lists are now the tool of choice for fake following”. While I disagree and feel that list management can be used in a way to follow a larger audience, it does glean perspective on whether or not people who follow you nowadays are listening.

Many folks cite the Dunbar number which states that you can really only effectively follow about 150 people. Others have chosen different approaches and just decided to clean house which is what Robert Scoble recently did by deleting all of his followers and starting from scratch again. Louis Gray found Robert’s tactic to be the wrong approach and provided insight as to why in his post to Jump on the massive unfollowing trend would be a mistake. Louis has shown me how he manages users on FriendFeed and he is a list managment ninja.  As you can tell by the way I’ve configured my tools and services I side more with Louis and also read about how Marshall Kirkpatrick manages people. Sure it takes quite a bit more work to have to create multiple lists and categorize people into them, but I feel it provides a  much more effective way to be able to make sure you can listen to them.

So how can you determine if or how well you are being heard? Well there are several good analytics tools that can help you figure that out. If you use a short URL service that offers the ability to see if people are actually clicking on the links you are sending out. I’m a fan of bit.ly which not only tells you how many clicks you got, but where they came from and over what period of time.

(referring sites from Google Analytics)

I can also find out if people are listening to me on various services when I send out notifications about new posts by looking at data in my web analytics program. I use Google Analytics but any of them will provide the info by looking at the referrer data.

Another fun thing that you can do with referrer data that I’ve only been able to glean from the traffic coming from FriendFeed is how people label you on their lists. Below is an image with a breakdown of 30 lists that people have placed me on where they clicked on my links to visit this blog. It has been interesting, enlightening and funny to see how some people have decided to classify me. This alone I believe provides pretty good evidence that I’m getting traffic specifically because people where able to find my links once they filtered my posts on their lists. There’s a good chance that otherwise, they may have never seen my posts come through their stream.

I think that the behavior of creating lists to filter people will continue to become a tactic used by many and as this continues to happen it will become important to make your way onto them or just get lost in their main stream.

(the lists that people have put me on FriendFeed)

Here’s a few links to help you learn about list management with the tools I discussed:

• FriendFeed – Managing the FriendFeed Stream
• Facebook – How to use Facebook’s Lists
• Tweetdeck – The Groups help page
• Seesmic – Hands on with Seesmic Desktop

One of the biggest criticisms I see of Lifestreaming is complaints that it is narcissistic behavior. People also reject them stating that people’s lives just aren’t interesting enough to follow them. A popular negative stereotype of Twitter users is that many just offer up boring updates of what they had for lunch. I’m here to tell you that Lifestreams can be much more than this and I now find many of them to be invaluable.

Think of your Lifestream as a blank canvas. There are no strict rules for what you should paint yours with. I’m here to provide you with 5 elements I use to create mine while trying to keep it fresh and interesting to attract and keep followers.
image courtesy of Flickr user Brent and Marilyn

1. Your Hobby or Personal Passion

All of us have these and finding multiple ways to incorporate them into your Lifestream is great way to keep it interesting. If you create or discover content related to them you should have the related services you use piped into your Lifestream. I use Delicious, Google shared items, and Twitter as a way to share the content I discover on the web with others. I use YouTube, my Blog, and Flickr to create content related to them to share in my Lifestream.

2. Local News / Events

I tend to follow a large number of Lifestreams for people who are local to me in LA and vice versa. I often share events that I attend or have interest in to my Lifestream using Upcoming. I also enjoy taking  photos of my dishes and sharing the location of local restaurants I eat at using Brightkite. You could also share reviews of restaurants using Yelp and add those to your Lifestream.

3. Your Work

We spend so much of our time doing it so it’s an important aspect of a Lifestream. I often discuss tools and services I use to make my job easier or ways to collaborate with co-workers. I also provide updates about what my company is doing or what related businesses are doing in my field. There is plenty of ways to provide both interesting and valuable information to others about your line of work.

4. Funny, Bizarre, Interesting Things

You know those wacky emails you get from your friends with crazy pictures or videos or those really interesting things you discover on a daily basis on the web. I usually will find one from someone whom I follow on Twitter and Retweet it with my witty add-on attached. Another common way I get these into my Lifestream is by favoriting a video on YouTube. There’s usually a handful of these that make their way into my stream on a daily basis and sharing these always provides a nice temporary distration.

5. Personal Life

Yes, regardless of what the naysayers I mentioned in the beginning say, everybody has interesting aspects of their life to share. Whether it’s a trip to a great place where you pipe your images into your Lifestream, or the milestones achieved by your kids, it’s all worthy of sharing. It’s great to get this information and I often find myself using it to spark discussions when I meet these people IRL. It’s also especially nice to provide these updates for long distance friends and family relationships where we don’t keep in touch as often with them.

I also like to share as much of the media I consume as possible. This can provide a pretty strong profile of my interests. I share the music I listen to using Last.fm, Blip.fm, and Pandora. I share books I’m reading using GoodReads, and movies I’m watching using Netflix. Once again, quite often these personal details I discover on other’s Lifestreams are recommendations. I have come across great new music, books,  and have eaten at fantastic restaurants solely based on the Lifestreams of people I follow.

If you need to discover some new services to add to your Lifestream, be sure to check out the Define page for some ideas.

…in conclusion

I follow the Lifestreams of many people that incorporate these and other methods to keep them appealing. I feel Lifestreaming has evolved into a way for people to curate web content and Life’s experiences interestingly in bite sized chunks for the world to see. Lifestreaming has created a new subscription model. I now subscribe to people much the same way I do RSS feeds for blogs. The difference is that my network of Lifestreamers provides a human powered way to bubble up great content to me.

If you create a nice balance of items from the above categories (or others you come up with) in your Lifestream you are likely to attract and retain people who share similar interests who will look to you as  someone to help provide them with daily content as well.

Leave a comment with details of unique ways that you populate your Lifestream to keep it fun and interesting below.

Today marked a huge day at Facebook as they have decided to open up their data stream via API to developers. Another major development and a step to an open standard for Lifestreaming was the simultaneous announcement that Facebook was supporting Activity Streams.

Of course they didn’t totally open things up and ReadWriteWeb provided details on the reality of what exactly will flow through the stream. Even the LA Times joined the throngs of those criticizing Facebook challenging that they aren’t as open as Twitter and stating that much of data will continue to be private and maintained by them.

Anyways, even if things haven’t totally opened up I think this is a step in the right direction and hopefully is just the start of continued plans to break down their walled garden. TechCrunch provided a nice live Qik stream of the technology demos. You can view the videos of the event here.

So I got to thinking a little about the announcement and began to wonder about how people will be able to share their data outside of Facebook now that they are allowed to. I immediately thought about how by default your profile and all aspects are set to private. So even with this announcement, I’m fairly sure that people will need to manually opt-in to begin sharing their stream outside of Facebook.

I figured that many people may not know where they need to do this and what options they have so I decided to record a screencast providing some basic details on where these settings are and how you can change them.

Note video best watched in HD mode on YouTube

Update: Alison Driscoll has posted a many more details regarding the privacy settings including how to utilize lists to better control what you share. You can view the post here.