I came across this post tonight which would lead you to believe so. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Here’s an image from the patent filed:

Here’s a snip from the post at All Facebook

On Tuesday, Facebook was awarded a major patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”. This is a huge deal for a number of reasons, most significantly that it grants Facebook the opportunity to pursue other social networks which are infringing on their patent. Included in the patent are additional claims including feed filters, feed advertising, searching the feed, and more. (update We’ve been told that this is about the implicit feed stories. Will update when we have more info.)

via Facebook Patents The News Feed | All Facebook.

Update: there’s a much more detailed post on ReadWriteWeb here with a good discussion on it here. Thanks to Mahendra Palsule for the tip.

Image courtesy of Flickr user r9M
I’ll start this off by saying that I had high hopes at the beginning of the year for technical advancements in Lifestreaming. I really thought we would see some new innovations from service providers and unique ways of processing data and create better filters to view it. Unfortunately I didn’t see many things this year that took Lifestreaming to the next level. I’d say that Lifestreaming was pretty stagnant and here are some of the reasons I feel that caused it.

Facebook Buys FriendFeed

FriendFeed was the leader in terms having the largest user-base for a standalone Lifestreaming service. I liken the Facebook purchase as it relates to Lifestreaming having been punched in the stomach and having the wind knocked out of it. Besides the many questions about the future of the service, it also marked the halt of the premier services evolution with their rapid new feature releases. The founders have stated that FriendFeed will continue to operate for the foreseeable future. Even though it’s still a great service with a vibrant community, it doesn’t appear to be a platform that will innovate any further in the Lifestreaming space.

Twitter’s Meteoric Rise

Twitter was without question the social media star of 2009. It’s continual upward path from a user adoption perspective has made it quite the force to be reckoned with. Its third party app eco-system and rise as the de-facto communications platform has made all other services take notice. With this snowball rolling down the hill most web services (Flickr, YouTube, uStream to name a few) all launched ways of integrating themselves with Twitter. Because of this cause and effect in play it has seemingly made Twitter become the primary Lifestreaming service for most people even though they weren’t aiming to attain that goal.

Lack of New Services

Both 2007 & 2008 saw an astonishing number of Lifestreaming services being released but 2009 saw the number fall. I’m not sure what to attribute this to. Most of the top services have all been acquired by top tiered players so perhaps startups felt that the appetite for such services has been met or has subsided. Along with that we saw many services shut down or release their code as open source. And even one popular open source Lifestreaming app saw its creator abandon it to join a service. I think it may actually have been that developers started to move on to other bigger things on the horizon such as…

Focus on Mobile and Location Services

It seems like a large number of initiatives this year revolved around the mobile space and vying for what is quickly becoming a platform we’re spending more time on than our laptops or desktops. And since it’s a new territory to be occupied its become a land-rush to try and stake claim quickly. Along with that location based services seem to be the darling of investors and users alike. I’m thinking a lot of developers and startups opted for this space over trying to become yet another Lifestreaming platform.

Improving Underlying Web Architecture

Another major development in 2009 was the race for real-time. We became a web of users with an insatiable need to get our information faster than ever before. Huge resources have gone into making this a reality this year and required quite a bit of heavy lifting which no doubt dried up time to work on other things.

I’m sure there are other reasons but these stood out as the main ones to me. I’m just going to chalk up this year as one of reflection and rebuilding and hope that next year will have in store the innovations that should come with this newly minted architecture and mountain of data we are all injecting into the cloud.

Don’t get me wrong though, it was still a good year for Lifestreaming in other ways. Mainstream adoption continues at a steady pace. AOL has really been a catalyst here with major pushes with the release of AIM with Lifestreaming built-in for their client, web and even iPhone apps. MySpace has also been promoting their release of Activity Streams within its service which aims to be the first Lifestreaming open standards platform which would be a great thing to see spread to other major players. This may become a reality much quicker now that Activity Streams proponents David Recordon has joined Facebook and Joseph Smarr has joined Google. And I’m sure that the FriendFeed team is already working on ways to take Facebook to the next level in terms of Lifestreaming. All of these things bode well for Lifestreaming to continue cementing itself as a function ingrained deep within all of these services.

Another area that could really use help with regards to Lifestreaming is managing the workflow of data across multiple services. We need it to become easier to create content, post it to one service, and then choose what other services we want it to land on with the flexibility from computers and mobile platforms. This is a pretty big problem that hadn’t been addressed to well this year except for one service that really began its rise called Posterous. The service really began taking off this year primarily because of its extreme simplicity and flexibility. It isn’t your traditional Lifestreaming service as I explained earlier in the year, but it does a pretty good job of solving the data workflow problem with their auto-posting functionality. They have really done a great job of extending the auto-posting functionality, most recently to both the bookmarklet with tags support. With the ability to attach anyting to an email and selectively choose where it goes I now use it as my primary way of routing data to various outposts of my Lifestream.

Earlier I mentioned how everyone was working on ways to integrate their services with Twitter. Recently we saw that both Wordpress and Tumblr decided to take that one step further. If services continue to open up making it easier to post between them along with adopting an open standard like Activity Streams, we should see the the technical barriers to Lifestreaming dissolve and see much simpler implementations make their way into our hands.

The other area I was also hoping to see progress made is in the way we consume the huge amount of data being created by everyone’s Lifestreams. Sadly this is another area that didn’t improve in 2009. There are a few services trying to tackle this primarily from an aggregated RSS feeds perspective but none of them have really impressed me. One bright spot for me here was Twitter Times which does a great job of showing me the top links being sent out by the people I follow on Twitter on a daily basis. What I want is a service that provides this across all the social media services I define it to but the challenge here is that every service would need a different set of data points to determine what the top content to show me would be. The data points would then need to be setup to be ranked by touch points that would be weighted higher by those in my social graph. For example, lets say I also want to see what YouTube videos were popular on a given day. The data points could be views, comments, favorites, and ratings. The touch points would be how my social graph affected each of those data points on a daily basis. Now keep in mind this is just one service and I want this to span multiple services across varying users on each of them and then have it displayed coherently for me on a daily basis. Ahhh one day perhaps.

Ok I think I started to ramble so I will stop here and just say that I won’t get my hopes up this year like I did last year (perhaps I jinxed it) but I do think the groundwork has been laid for what should hopefully bring us good things at the start of a new decade.

Keep on Lifestreaming!

Today provided several serendipitous stories which is what led me to write this post along with its headline. I’ll start with some of my own observations.

One of the biggest barriers towards allowing a simpler and more fluid Lifestreaming experience is the lack of open standards. While creating a Lifestream has become a fairly simple process at this point, the ability to move data across the different services that make it up is another story. While there are several different initiatives trying to correct this problem, they have been moving slowly and lacked any real traction.

Just over the last week or so we have seen some major developments that are starting to shake things up a bit though. Both Wordpress and Tumblr announced within days of each other their support for communicating with the Twitter API. Why is this such a big deal? Well Twitter is quickly becoming a common central communication point between all of our social networks, it is also a platform with the largest quantity of 3rd party apps.

So its been a little difficult to wrap our heads around the bigger picture here but from what I can tell the following will start to happen. More sites and services will start to do the same and soon what we currently are using primarily as Twitter clients will become apps that will provide the routing of data from one source service through Twitter and along to multiple destination services that we can configure. Apps like Tweetdeck, Seesmic and Tweetie will become our indispensable social media dashboards AND data routing platforms.

“The Linking Open Data dataset cloud” Image courtesy of Regis Gaidot

I can tell you that developing data workflows and rules for where to send certain types of content while trying to avoid duplication with limited choices depending on whether I’m on a desktop or mobile platform has been the biggest challenge for my personal Lifestreaming. Things have gotten much better for me thanks to Posterous, which has taken care of a good chunk of my problems. I still have issues with duplication and I’m forced to send everyting through their service as the mediator. Ideally no single service would own this routing and if the Twitter API becomes an open standard we could see this flourish much nicer.

So the first post that caught my eye was this post from Freddy Snijder where he summarizes and discusses the Twitter API much better than I just did with its potential impacts as it relates to Activity Streams. Definitely worth heading over and taking a read but I snip this for you:

You might ask yourself, why would I want to retweet, reply and converse from one social media platform to the other? Well, for one, you would like to retweet/forward content items you found in the activity stream of one platform to the users of another platform because these users might use the second platform and not the first, or this specific content item really fits the topics conversed about on the second platform (interesting for specialized social networks such as on Ning).

Another important reason could be that you would like to augment content in a way that is possible on one platform but not on the other. An example could be replying as in reblogging. In Twitter you can reply only in 140 characters, which is sometimes cumbersome. It could very well be you want to reply to a tweet in the form of a blog giving you more space to elaborate. So, in this case, you might reblog the tweet to Tumblr adding your response in blog form.

Later in the day I read about how Facebook is testing the next generation of OAuth on FriendFeed. In March I was at SXSW and spent time with both Paul Bucheit (FriendFeed founder) and David Recordon (formerly of Six Apart and Activity Streams advocate). Now they are both at Facebook working together to hopefully make significant progress to open things up and enable cross communication with other services.

Lastly we learned last week that another Activity Streams advocate (and friend of David Recordon’s) Joseph Smarr was headed to Google to lead “a new company-wide focus on the future of the Social Web”. Then I see a tweet sent out tonight from Chris Saad linking to this post at the Google Blog by Jonathan Rosenberg about The Meaning of Open. This is quite the manifesto and if its principles are adopted I think we’re in for some good things.

So as you can see today, along with events over the last week, have prompted me to declare the tipping point. I hope I’m right about this and that we see an era of open free flowing data become a reality because frankly dealing with this has in my mind created quite a stagnant period for us this year where I was hoping to see more innovation but it can’t come until these issues are resolved.

I was surprised when I looked at the online schedule of day 2 of the 140Conf because I saw a talk on there for MySpace on “The Future of the Lifestream”. I hadn’t seen it before so my guess is that it was a last minute add on. I was impressed as this was now the second talk at 140Conf on Lifestreaming (The panel I was on presented the previous day).

Monica Keller speaks to the crowd at the Kodak Theater for the 140Conf (more photos below)

To cut right to the chase, Monica Keller of MySpace was showing their Activity Streams implementation. Activity Streams is an extension to the Atom format that was designed to store the format and information that could be used for a Lifestream. I was probably the most excited person in the Kodak Theater for this talk. I have been following the Activity Streams initiative since its inception and had heard about MySpace adopting it but this was the first time I got to see the goods and get full details behind it.

Here’s a short clip I recorded from Monica’s talk

Mike Jones who is now the COO of MySpace spoke prior to Monica and he spent quite a bit of time emphasizing the importance of the (Life)Stream. He even stated that “The stream is the flowing blood of a social network”. So it seems like MySpace gets it. They understand that providing a central presence for an open platform that facilitates the sharing of content created outside of their service is crucial to their success.

I was able to speak to Monica for a little while after her talk and discussed some more specifics about what they’re working on. I believe she told me that they expect to roll out Lifestreaming to all users this year, but I haven’t been able to get her to confirm this via email prior to this post.

Now I think everyone sees the elephant in the room and knows that MySpace has quite an uphill battle to regain all the users that its been hemorrhaging to Facebook but their Lifestreaming implementation may be able to help them retain and possibly get some users back depending on how well it’s implemented. Facebook’s implementation for allowing you to import services is limited, fairly hidden and not very good.

I really am looking forward to watching MySpace push this envelope helping bust the dam of data that is necessary to get all social networks to compete on the same playing field. I for one am definitely paying attention to MySpace now and will watch how this plays out over the next few months.

Photos from the talk. Full set on Flickr here

Image courtesy of Louis Gray
Its now been well over 24 hours since the initial shock that FriendFeed has been acquired by Facebook. I’ve been watching all the reactions originating both by the coverage surrounding the deal as well as the user community on the FriendFeed site itself. It’s been a pretty surreal two days that have included a huge bag of reactions and emotions across the web. Here are my current thoughts on the situation.

I first joined FriendFeed in October of 2007 just weeks after they launched in private beta. I remember after my first visit not being very impressed with their initial release and quickly dismissing it as another one of the many new Lifestreaming services to launch at that time that didn’t really bring anything new to the table. That changed over just a few short months after and when I decided to create the Lifestreaming services comparison matrix in Feb of 2008 (I really need to update this) it had risen to become the most feature rich service out there.

It was also around this time that I started to become very active on the service. FriendFeed chose to pave a new path beyond solely being a Lifestreaming service. They quickly became a differentiating service when they decided to go down the SocialStream path and focus on creating conversations around the items that made up people’s Lifestreams. They did this by launching two features that would become their defining ones to achieve this. First they created a very quick and simple way to allow people to create comments on items. Then they changed the logic of just displaying a reverse chronological stream of items by introducing the “like” feature. As users of the service would click on the like button (or comment on them), that item would re-appear withing peoples streams. These two features (which were both subsequently copied and implemented by Facebook) are what propelled them to become a very powerful conversational platform that I feel has to this day not been matched in another service.

So fast forward to yesterday. I go to lunch and when I return saw a tweet (don’t rem from who) that said FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook. So the first thing I do is check the calendar and make sure it wasn’t 4/1 and then quickly start searching for more info. It didn’t take long to verify the news. I was shocked. My mind started to wander about what this would mean for the FriendFeed sites’ future and I immediately didn’t feel it would be good. I started to feel a bit numb. I had never invested the amount of time and passion in a web service as I have with FriendFeed. For me it has been the human component and friendships I have made on the the service that has made it so great. FriendFeed lowered the barrier of communication so as to make it easy to interact with many of the web’s technorati. It was FriendFeed that provided me the ability to trade dialog and befriend them along with so many other great people in a way that I haven’t been able to anywhere else. The thought of this going away has definitely caused some anguish.

The future of FriendFeed is still uncertain but from a telling paragraph in the interview by TechCrunch as well as the post over at Inquisitr, it would appear that the chances of the site continuing are slim. Yesterday Paul Bucheit stated that he’d do the best he can to ensure that the community is treated right and I believe he will. But he also acknowledged his personal limitations in stating that he can’t make any promises on other’s behalf. I pointed out in Paul’s thread a few things that I’d like to see. This included the ability to export our data as well as a tool to import our friends to Facebook. I also voiced my concern regarding the state of their in-house ff.im short url serviced used for links posted through the service. No word yet on any of these.

So today after much of the raw emotion started to subside and the reality of the situation started to settle in people on FriendFeed started talking about alternatives as well as other options. ReadWriteWeb did a fantastic job today on this topic. First Sarah Perez identified Streamy.com as a possible new destination, then Marshall Kirkpatrick writes an eye-opening piece on whether now is the time for the creation of a distributed social network.

Both of these were big topics on FriendFeed today. Many started talking about and trying out Streamy. Apparently so many users started testing the service that Ben Parr discussed that it buckled for a little while under the pressure. I like what Streamy has done recently to re-invent itself but they have a difficult decision to make regarding whether to tweak their service in hopes of acommodating the potential FriendFeed user base or continue with their planned initiative prior to today’s limelight. I’m friends with Don Mosites who is one of their founders and I will no doubt be talking to him about this as well as previous features I’ve been pushing him to implement which aren’t related to FriendFeed.

I love the idea put out by Marshall regarding a distributed social network but feel that the barriers to entry for such a service are pretty high. Activity Streams, DiSO, and Data Portability are all fine initiatives but they have been plodding along at a slow pace and I don’t believe that they are being held back by technical issues but  by beauracratic business obstacles instead which are much harder to overcome. There seems to be some headway being made however from what I’ve read recently about them and perhaps the FriendFeed situation will provide some help to further these along. One other interesting possibility was suggested by Mark Rizzn in a post where he posits whether Wordpress could create an alternative replacement as well.

On FriendFeed there have also been conversations about building an open distributed service as well. I have even joined these conversations and pointed them to the collection of scripts and other open source Lifestreaming tools that I have found over the last 2 years, but I don’t think that most of the FriendFeed users will wait for this to come to fruition and will likely find a new place to call home before this could become a reality.

Many podcasters scrambled yesterday to record impromptu shows surrounding the FriendFeed acquisition. I don’t recall any other site purchases ever causing such a large amount of people to want to react so quickly. One of the best ones I heard was the Social Geeks Podcast which included Louis Gray, Wayne Sutton, Jeff Smith, Corvida, Sarah Perez, and Chris Miller (aka IdoNotes) all of whom are very active FriendFeed users so their thoughts and perspective were especially enlightening. One things that I had been thinking about personally and had my own thoughts on was why did FriendFeed sell? They repeatedly stated that they had no interest in selling or cashing out whenever they were interviewed and I believed that. I think Louis nailed it on this podcast (covered starting at 28:40) when he stated that the writing was on the wall with both the eminent release of Google Wave along with the continual copycat advancements made by Facebook. So it would appear that the sale was more due to concerns with their viability in the future and wanting to make a successful exit while they were still on top.

Dave Winer and Marshall Kirkpatrick also recorded their Bad Har Day podcast where they took in calls to discuss people’s reactions. Dave also wrote a very interesting post spurred by the podcast here. Lastly the fan created FFundercats podcast (not online yet) recorded their very emotional reactions to the news and were also joined by Louis Gray.

One thing I’m pretty happy about is the fact that I chose to use the excellent Wordpress Lifestream plugin (also the author is working on a new Lifestreaming service to launch soon at Lifestrm.com) for my personal Lifestream on my blog. By using this plugin I store all of my Lifestream data in my Wordpress database ensuring that I own and don’t lose any of that data. And speaking of data, I reached out to Rob May who is the founder of Lifestream Backup to find out if they currently supported FriendFeed. He told me that they currently didn’t but had been getting a large number of requests to do so. So today he wrote a post looking to see how strong the interest is and to see if it would move to the top of the feature priority list.

Since I’m on the topic of blogs, I’ve also been paying attention to Chris Saad and his recent post on Blogs are Back is very interesting. The advancement in so many tools including Echo pose another strong possibility that many people may consider reverting back to their blogs and utilizing the power of these tools for the conversation.

So where do I stand? Well FriendFeed is still up and running and chances are that I’ll continue to use the service until the last server is shut down. That being said, I am definitely keeping my eyes open for other possible options but at this point in a very strange way I almost feel relieved and ready to submit to the almighty Facebook primarily because its been challenging having to participate on an extra service and being able to consolidate that makes my workflow much easier. I know crazy talk and I might change my mind tomorrow but I do feel that way a bit right now. The one wildcard for me at this point that I’m really looking forward to is Google Wave. The buzz around it seems amazing, and I’m impressed by what I’ve been able to see. If anyone can get me an early invite please send it over as I’d like to see what all the fuss is about and see if it lives up to the hype.