Mashable Causes a Lifestreaming Mind Numb

First off I’ll say that I’m glad to see Lifestreaming continue growing awareness across the web. Unfortunately, due partly to the openness of the concept and plethora of services and methods to create them, confusion is rampant. That appears to be the case after this recent post on Mashable titled “20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking Profiles”. It was a month ago that I went off on a rant about another Mashable article that in my opinion put a negative spin on Lifestreaming.

In this post, author Stan Shroeder attempts to compile a huge list of services with short single paragraph descriptions in which I gleefully watch him use the Lifestream term 8 times (yes I counted them). I knew before finishing the piece that there would be an abundance of comments listing services that he had missed as this is becoming a very crowded space.

Although confusing, I hope the story at least piqued readers curiosity to begin exploring these services and learn more about Lifestreaming. Many of the services out there start with the same functional foundation of providing external service aggregation, but most branch off into many different directions from there. The article made me realize that I need to be spending more time working on my comparison matrix as well as starting to try and classify services into some categorized groupings to help steer people in some direction as well.