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!

If you’re not familiar with Flavors.me it’s Lifestreaming service that I really like. I wrote about how it’s a great way to easily get a beautiful Lifestream built quickly. Well they have now officially launched their service and along with continuing to offer the great features available during the beta for free, they now have premium accounts with additional features.

For a mere $20 a year you can also get the following

• Custom domain
• Real time traffic stats
• Support for Clicky and Google Analytics
• A fancy Lightbox contact form

They also plan to release a more advanced layout framework, an updated members directory along with a powerful search and new browsing tools. You can take a look at my page on Flavors.me here.

If you’re headed to SXSW be sure to meet the team on Saturday March 13th at 11:15AM at the Meet the press event.

The annual pilgrimage to SXSW is upon us once again. Last year was my first time there and I had an amazing time. This year I feel a bit more prepared and plan to take full advantage of what I learned. If you’re new this year, or just want some good tips, ReadWriteWeb has created a handy list. There were plenty of complaints around coverage for iPhones but I’ve read that AT&T says their network will be ready this year. If that’s the case then you better make sure you’re prepared for the overtime usage your phone will be getting. I’ve purchased 2 iPhone 2200 mAh backup battery packs at Monoprice.com (sorry, can’t link to product page since site is down). These work great and are only $14 each. I recommend you seek a similar option for your mobile phone as well.

The SXSW website has created a nice personal scheduling section this year along with an iPhone app but I do still like the Sched.org version which offers some additional features as well as showing who else is attending panels and more. Also be sure to check out the new service by Sitby.us which aims to help you let your friends know which and exactly where you’ll be sitting at panels.

So there were 5 panels with some form of Lifestreaming proposed (one of which I was on) but unfortunately none of them got selected. Kind of a bummer since social media aggregation has really become such a dominating strategy for even the big players now. I still was able to look at the panels and find a few that are worthy of attending if you feel as letdown as I had.

Here are a few Lifestream related panels worth considering

• ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? – This appears to be a primer on what has become the leading Lifetreaming open standard adopted by many.
• Gmail: Behind the Scenes – Some of the engineers and product managers behind Google Buzz will be talking here.
• Can the Real-Time Web Be Realized? – Judging by some of the panelists there may be some Lifestreaming nuggets strewn across their talk.
• The Life Graph: You Are Your Location – While sounding like an LBS talk the description mentions what could be some interesting topics around Lifestream data.
• Time + Social + Location. What’s Next In Mobile Experiences? – Description a bit vague but may offer something interesting.
• Engines of Sociality: 2010 and Beyond – “…transformative technologies and paradigms on the horizon in 2010 that will power the new augmented sociality, including the social filtering, personalization, and contextualization of real-time messaging.” Could be interesting.
• Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web & Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends & also Search Patterns: Tangible Futures for Discovery – May offer some thoughts on Lifestream data and search.
• 2010: The Year We Broadcast Our Credit Card – Thoughts on Lifestreaming and privacy.

So as you can see there’s still a few topic based talks that should offer some insight into were Lifestreaming is today and where it may be going. Last year there was also an Activity Streams meetup at the end of one of the days and I’ve heard they’re planning another one. Also, I’ll be attending the Mashable party which is being sponsored by the very good Cliqset Lifestreaming service.

But I also know that many of these discussions will also occur in the hallways where I had many good ones last year. In fact last year I was glad to have met many great people including readers of this blog whom I talked to about Lifestreaming. I look forward to more of the same this year so if you happen to see me wandering around please say hello. You can check out my profile on the SXSW site or on Sched.org so that we can connect. You can also see many places I’ll be headed to on Plancast or better yet stalk me on FourSquare, Gowalla, or Brightkite along with Twitter.

It has become a very common trend to use Minority Report as a reference whenever referring to interactive visualization interfaces. I came across a video that takes this approach and applies it to Lifestreaming. As soon as I started to watch it I knew it looked familiar to me. That’s because I wrote about it a year ago. The video was created by the Vodafone Group’s user experience / concept development group.

click image to view on YouTube and select 1080p & expand the view for awesomeness

I decided to repost this not only because it’s a very cool video showing some unique interactive visualizations, but because it was reposted in glorious 1080p HD goodness on YouTube. I’m embedding it below for convenience but I recommend watching it on YouTube and making sure you select the 1080p option and expand its size. Just like when we see concept cars at auto shows, I’m wondering how far out these types of user interfaces are.

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.