photo by soapylovedeb
I just returned from SXSW and had a really good time. There’s been some negative feedback from the event this year which I feel revolves mainly around the parties. I’ll cover that in a wrap-up post later but that’s not what I wanted to talk about here.

It’s amazing to think that I first blogged about Lifestreaming on February 18th of 2007. I wrote that post to talk about  how the research I had done so that I could aggregate my web services (social media wasn’t even really a common term at that point) onto a single page to be displayed in reverse chronological order to show what some people at that time were terming as a Lifestream. I pointed to some scripts and a Wordpress plugin that required some serious hacking to achieve this which I painfully did myself. I also pointed to some examples that people had created and other resources on what I had found. I immediately felt that this would be something big that was going to transform the web.

I continued to be intrigued and kept doing research on the subject. Realizing that this was a difficult process for me and that nobody else was writing about it, I felt compelled in a passionate way to create a site where I could cover this information for people as a resource. By the way, finding a niche you are passionate about to start a blog where you don’t care if anyone reads it is the best way to get into blogging.

So on March 17th 2007 I launched the site with its hello world blog post. It’s now three years later and I’m still excited about the developments and evolution of Lifestreaming. When I first started covering this there wasn’t a single service available to people to do it and then shortly after there were a ton including Jaiku (purchased by Google), SocialThing (purchased by AOL), and FriendFeed (purchased by Facebook). With Lifestreaming services provided by all of those players, along with Microsoft and Yahoo, it’s clear that this method of publishing content has penetrated the mainstream and has created a paradigm shift in the way we all personally publish content on the web.

While I’m happy that Lifestreaming has captured the excitement of the large players it has brought with it some negative aspects. It has killed off many of the startups that fueled its rise, and in the same process released less feature rich versions than the companies they bought which in the cases where they were left running (cough FriendFeed) still provide better features and functionality than any of the big boys. Much of this transpired over the last 18 months and in my 2009 year end post I discussed my disapointment about what had transpired. I’m gonna chalk it up to some stagnation during another wave of growth.

At this point I am too feeling a bit burnt out around the personal aggregation and numerous ways we can easily syndicate the content we publish everywhere. I feel that we’ve really gotten good at this and with the masses adopting this publishing system we’ve also created quite the monster. The prevailing theme everyone is discussing now is how do we find ways to reduce the noise and find ways to filter so that we can find the content that matters most to us.

So now I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the flip-side of Lifestreaming which is finding ways to consume all of this content being generated. I spent a lot of time at SXSW discussing my thoughts on ways to achieve this with as many of the talented developers, startups, and bloggers who were willing to hear me out while there. My ideas seem to have been received pretty well and I plan to write a long post describing and diagramming my thoughts on this very soon. My hope is to freely put the information out there for everyone to discuss and flesh out and hopefully it can evolve into something that is built. That’s my hope anyways.

So on the beginning of this 4th year of Lifestream Blog I want to thank all of you great readers who have motivated me to continue this site with all your kind words and feedback over the years. I feel very fortunate to have found a topic I love to cover along with so many others who seem to enjoy it the same way I do.

Cheers!

The FFundercats Podcast is a show run by FriendFeeders Josh Haley and Johnny Worthington where every week they discuss the service often with various users from FriendFeed as their guests. They’ll discuss the service itself but also delve into the users of the community and what interesting things they shared or discovered over the course of the week. It’s a great show because Johnny (an Aussie with attitude) and Josh (a kickass ukulele player) are cool people that don’t take the show too seriously and enjoying have fun on there. That’s exactly what I found when I joined them last week.

We started the show discussing the FriendFeed outage from the night before. Johnny took issue with MG Siegler’s post and joking stab during the outage. I personally didn’t pay much mind to it and didn’t get caught up in any drama. You can hear both my viewpoint and Johnny’s on this but lets just say that I try not to pay much attention or waste energy arguing the value of a service for myself because I’d much rather spend that time constructively with the users who have already embraced it.

We go on to a much funner and lighthearted topic after that…Olympic Curling. We discuss our collective excitement over its coverage and even take turns coming up with some pretty interesting and innovative ways that the sport could evolve into something much better funner to watch.

We talk about this and plenty more. You can stream it below or visit their site to download MP3 versions or subscribe to their podcast on iTunes.

When I first started this blog in March of ‘07 there were only a handful of custom scripts that allowed you to aggregate your social services. Over the months thereafter a large number of services launched to do this for you. In November of ‘08 I wrote about how Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google were all slowly rolling out pieces to bring Lifestreaming to the mainstream. In Google’s case it was the creation of the user profile and the ability to link our social services to it. It was a small step towards their larger plan to enter the social streaming landscape.

Pulling data from multiple social services and having friends view and interact with it in one place has become an integral part of the web’s evolution. Google finally entered the social streaming space last week with the release of Buzz. With Google entering the market, it pretty much sends out the definitive statement acknowledging that social activity aggregation is here to stay.

I feel Google has closely watched the social aggregation phenomenon play out over the last few years whilst planning for a way to tap it, specifically as its become a critical data point for search. I’m sure I will write quite a bit about Buzz as time goes on but I wanted to focus a little on the decision to integrate it into Gmail.

Buzz could become a social destination and remove Gmail requirements in one simple step

I don’t think it was a good idea for Google to try and build a thriving social media platform strapped on to email. There are a couple of issues with this. Email is still a very important communication tool used primarily for business, private, or small group conversations. It’s a place where we can get work and other things done without the distraction of social media. Do we really need social media to invade our productivity tools? What’s next a sliding ticker of Twitter updates coming across a column on Excel?

Besides, another problem is that to participate in this social circle you need to be a Gmail user. That alone eliminates a huge number of existing users that don’t have accounts and adds additional overhead which I imagine will alienate many new users. Sure the majority of techies use Gmail as their webmail client but it’s still in 3rd place overall as a mail provider much smaller than Yahoo or Microsoft.

Speaking of Yahoo, most of my tech friends are Gmail users and yes I have an account there but Yahoo is my primary email service. Many probably don’t know it but Yahoo rolled out similar functionality to Buzz over a year ago. While they do offer a standalone version of their social service, they also decided to integrate with email. Yahoo’s interface to add services is a thing of beauty and their profile pages have matured very well with a clean design and great functionality. So Google has apparently taken a similar approach but didn’t pay attention to Yahoo’s much better refinements.

Yahoo’s email integration has been pretty unobtrusive for me and has never really interfered with my existing mail usage. Yahoo does a good job of relegating the social data to its own tab and never forced any of its functionality to invade my email. The only time I’ve seen them do something that did cross that boundary actually happened in a situation I thought was pretty cool.

Yahoo mail provides the latest updates from the services users have linked to their profiles on the sent email confirmation page now. I think that’s an innovative way to leverage a user’s activity stream. I liked their thinking here but think they need a simple option to remove this feature for those that want to opt out.

Forced Gmail integration with Buzz is something that many people (including myself) have not been happy about. Yahoo got it right by not requiring email integration to participate in their social service. You have the ability to view all of your friends activities from an “updates” tab on your profile page. I think this is a very important distinguishing factor and wish Google would offer the same thing. They could do this by also offering a separate activity tab from our Google profile pages. I think this would provide a giant step in the right direction for keeping Buzz separate from Gmail and building out profiles to become a social destination at the same time.

My profile & social activity as well as my friends is viewable separate from email on Yahoo

Besides forced Gmail intergration another problem we’ll see with Buzz is that it’s an aggregator which has proven to be a difficult sell to the mainstream. FriendFeed was a pioneer in this area and have created an amazing service to enjoy social streaming. Still they saw growth flatten and decided to sell to Facebook last year. Google has huge mindshare so it’s possible they could overcome mainstream penetration issues but the Gmail integration and what I feel has been a pretty poor user experience out of the gate isn’t a good start. I think more mainstream folks already happy with their current social network and in the current state of Buzz won’t be compelled enough to add yet another service. In the end a service is only as good as the number of friends you have participating on them.

As negative as I may sound about Buzz right now, I’m actually hoping they really improve it and will be rooting for them. For a non-beta release it seems very rushed and unpolished so I’m thinking they decided this product had to get out the door before they continue to lose traction in the social media landscape. As such I’m sure they will be allocating resources to continue trying to get it right. I will be an active user on the service and will continue to cover their developments for you here. You can connect with me on Google Buzz here.

In 2009 FriendFeed continued their dominance as the clear leader in the social streaming* space. But in the middle of the year when they were acquired by Facebook, their future path was largely in question and many users began seeking alternative services. FriendFeed has a pretty devoted community and while many continue to still use the service they are keeping an eye on any up and coming alternatives.

(*Social Streaming is the aggregation of multiple users’ Lifestreams with a community built around it to foster discussion)

Cliqset has become one of the top services now mentioned as a possible FriendFeed alternative and users appear to be watching them closely. Today they launched a slew of changes that continue shaping themselves as a premier social streaming service.

They’ve re-designed the UI quite a bit making changes that provide a simpler and more straightforward experience. It also paved the way for some of the functionality to snap neatly into place which includes several great additions.

File sharing is now available that also offers features within the service depending on the file type. For instance MP3’s will provide an in-line player once uploaded.

Groups functionality has been added which now offers niche based areas to be created which are isolated and separate from the regular user streams. These can be used to create areas that revolve around hobbies, brands, or any other niche you can imagine creating a custom stream for.

I see both of these features as evolutionary that now gets them closer to the standard feature set offered by FriendFeed and I’ll need to play with them some more to identify any distinguishing differences or nuances that make them different but these are important additions that helps get them up to par.

The feature which is unique to them and the coolest in my opinion for this release is their Streams. This allows you to create a custom filter that allows you to dial it in by Activity Type (blogs, photos, bookmarks, etc.)  Users, and Services. This feature helps set them up for what I feel is one of social streaming’s biggest challenges which is to fine tune the meaningful content we want to see on a daily basis from the mountain of data coming in. This is a nice first step but I look forward to watching this evolve with some automated logic.

They’ve also updated their Air client which although I haven’t tried yet, co-founder Darren Bounds gave me a demo and it looked pretty cool allowing a nice customizeable drag and drop column based interface that offered a way to organize the streams a little more effectively than the web app. And if you fancy yet another way to consume your streams they also released a fresh new Firefox extension as well. As if that’s not enough there’s also support for Boxee now!

Louis Gray calls Cliqset the “Swiss army knife for Web service updates” and with all these new tools it’s easy to see why. But although these updates are all front-end consumer facing Cliqset has also done everything they can to implement open standards across the board within their platform including using Activity Streams and leveraging Pubsubhub. ReadWriteWeb also wrote about the efforts with their FeedProxy release to enable developers to take advantage of their platform.

I feel that as technology continues to march on over the next year and FriendFeed not actively being devloped, Cliqset is in a great position. With their eyes focused on building an open standards based platform that is developer friendly, offering real-time updates functionality, and continuing to release features to easily share and create discussions around streaming content, Cliqset is on a path towards becoming the new king of social streaming services.

If you’re already on Cliqset or going to join, you can connect with me on here.

You can read more on Cliqset’s release

• Cliqset Upgrades Aggregator with Groups, Activity Streams – Louis Gray
• Cliqset Update Includes File Sharing and a Firefox Plugin – Mashable (Christina Warren)
• FriendFeed Clone Cliqset Upgrades Real-Time Platform With Sharing, Groups And Firefox Add-On – TechCrunch (Leena Rao)

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!