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.

This is the first guest post from reader Trae Blain. You can visit his site at traeblain.com. If you are interested in writing a guest post, just head on over to the contact page

In a sea of lifestreaming services, UnHub tries to distinguish itself from the other services by offer a simple portal into your online life. UnHub is a brand new player to the lifestreaming market that started out of inspiration from the Skittle’s brand experiment that used social media websites as its primary website.

The Gist

Unlike other lifestreaming services out there that aggregate your data into one common place, UnHub simply adds an iframe bar above all your online services with links that point to the services you add. Anyone can create an account—for anybody. Here’s Barack Obama’s UnHub as well as My (Trae Blain) UnHub. The service is extremely lightweight since it does not actually grab any of your data, but merely points people to the location of that data.

TechCrunch points out that this is a great tool for businesses that participate in social media, as illustrated in this Josie’s Restaurant Unhub. Personal and business use will also be fond of the simple analytics feature that is included with the service to see what links are clicked and what links nobody cares about.

In Practice

Usage is fairly easy. It asks you what services you use and what are the links to the profiles for those services. UnHub appears to support a large number of services (which would be expected with a service with such little overhead), 57 in fact. After creating an account you are asked for an email and password to associate with the account which allows you to view the Analytics feature. Each UnHub address requires a landing page to start with, and can easily be selected with the Home check box.

UnHub also allows for the selection of websites outside of the supported 57, although those sites won’t include a favicon in the top bar. UnHub is a nice service that can be leveraged by people/companies that want to use something like Twitter searches or any number of personal sites for their UnHub group.

Not all Peachy

UnHub does have its set of issues. Due to Twitters setup, UnHub does not work directly with it. Instead it substitutes Tweetree for Twitter updates profile viewing. Tweetree has a nice interface, but it’s not Twitter and could turn heavy Twitter users off to its use. Also, there’s no way to style your UnHub Bar. My UnHub uses a meager 15 services (only 26% of the ones offered) and the bar tends to push the other service’s content under the crease, Especially on low resolution monitors. Also, adding new services can be a chore. The “supported” services do not simply ask for your username and then it finds the appropriate link, the actual url must be entered into the form. Remembering some of these and tracking them down can sometimes be a pain. Also after the initial setup, you can only add one service at a time. It would be much easier to add multiple links before having to save the page.

To Sum it Up

UnHub offers a nice service that I believe many people would prefer in things like email signatures. UnHub provides the benefit of sending people directly to the content’s location (save Twitter), instead of aggregating it all into one place. It is a different approach to lifestreaming that some will find preferable over other methods commonly used today.

I found out yesterday that Swurl.com has shut down. Swurl isn’t the first Lifestreaming service to go the way of go dark. They join several others which I update on my Lifestreaming services listing page. But in this case it was a little surprising considering that the service received quite a bit of fanfare when they launched just 8 months ago. They received coverage from many major sites including ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, Webware, Lifehacker, and Somewhat Frank.  My review of the service is here.

If you visit the site now you get a message that basically states the creators just don’t have time to maintain the site anymore. This is understandable but they could have done a better job warning users. An email several weeks before shutting down,  giving active users lead time prior to the closure would have been nice. This would have been a thoughtful gesture since at the end of the announcement they promote two other sites of theirs.

The closure brings up a few things to keep in mind when choosing a Lifestreaming or any other web service for that matter. Besides the bummer of losing a service you chose to be your Lifestraming home, there can be many other issues to be concerned with that will require refactoring in this web world of intertwined services and mashups.

From a Lifestreaming perspective you are probably for the most part importing your content from other services but there are still some areas where you may have content you want that was created natively on the service. Posts made directly, comments, bookmarked items,  friendship / follower data and more. If no warning is given, and no options to export information are available, you appear to pretty much be SOL.

This is probably one of the biggest arguments and reasons why we need Data Portability. I won’t get into those details (as I’ve covered it before) but it’s an important concept that will hopefully become adopted in some form soon.

So beyond the loss of content, Lifestreaming services also can be a bit more complicated than other sites because we may have a workflow that is fully dependent on them. For instance I sync my Twitter status to Facebook and I publish my FriendFeed posts to Twitter. Those are just two examples but nowadays many people have some pretty complicated workflows where they use a source service to move or sync data amongst various other services (fodder for another post I need to write). So with the loss of a Lifestreaming service you may need to remap your workflow.

Lastly, if you are using either embeddable widgets or scripts that pull data via API to your own blog. Those will now not function. For that matter any other 3rd party tools such as browser addons, third party sites or apps that worked with the service will also come to a screeching halt. Can you imagine if Twitter shut down? There is a whole cottage industry that has formed on the back of them that would suddenly disappear.

Anyways, I just wanted to provide some important things for you to think about along this topic.  As Chris Jobling thoughtfully pointed out regarding the shutdown, “don’t get too attached to a single Web 2.0 service! In the current economic climate, there’ll be a few that fall by the wayside”. Wise words to live by as I unfortunately think he’s right.

UPDATE: Two more Lifestreaming services are struggling. I guess it’s a sign of the times.

• Dandelife is moving to open source
• Profilactic is looking for a buyer

2008 has been a tremendous year for Lifestreaming. When I first began researching Lifestraming back in February of 2007 and then started this blog a month after there were only a few scripts available to create a Lifestream and not a single web service dedicated to them. Since then I have found over 50 services as well as tons of scripts and plugins to host your own. It has clearly become one of the hottest concepts to take off on the web. Here are some of this years highlights.

Lifestreaming is Wired!

I started the year with a post titled Will 2008 Bring Lifestreaming to the Masses. Wired had just released an issue with their usual expired/tired/wired list in which Lifestreaming made an appearance. A few days later Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb wrote a Lifestreaming Primer that gave a quick overview and featured 5 services to create a Lifestream. A little over a month later Josh Catone posted 35 Ways to Stream Your Life which built on Richard’s post and provided a huge boost. ReadWriteWeb would continue to be a leading voice on the Lifestreaming front along with plenty of coverage from Mashable, TechCrunch, Webware and plenty more.

FriendFeed breaks out as the leading service

Early in the year several Lifestreaming services were still jockeying for position without a clear leader in the space. That seemed to all change in March when Just a few weeks after FriendFeed had opened up to the public and TechCrunch had featured them as this years Twitter. Mark Rizzin of Mashable provided his thoughts as did Rafe Needleman over at Webware. Louis Gray who was an early adopter provided a list of Elite Bloggers that were joining in droves. Most of these people and many more are now regular users of the service. And finally Robert Scoble has become its leading Evangelist providing the values of the service often throughtout the year and recently recorded a lengthy video to show you.

I have covered many services this year but feel that FriendFeed has clearly made its way to the forefront. One may point to many different reasons for this. Be it the slew of new features, the reliability and speed, the search, or most importantly the release of an API. But I feel that the primary reason most people, including myself, have made it such a frequent destination is the community of users that it has garnered. I have met some really great people, have discovered content, and have participated in some great conversations across a multitude of topics. Its this dynamic interactive community that has led it to the top.

Lifestreaming services become acquisition targets

In late 2007 Google snapped up Jaiku. While some felt it was a play to get get a micro-blogging service to counter Twitter, I heard from several insiders that they had specific interest in the Lifestreaming aspects of the service. In April I discovered Lifestream.fm and was fairly impressed by the service launching with a good set of features immediately to public beta. Some immediately questioned their viability to compete with FriendFeed but just a few weeks later it was announced that they had been acquired by Mister Wong. Another service which was a darling of SXSW and also drew comparisons to FriendFeed (which I found distinct differences in and wrote about) was SocialThing. They continued to get major press and comparisions which led to an eventual purchase from AOL in August.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and AOL all added Lifestreaming initiatives in 2008

Not to be left behind and seeing the writing on the wall (or walled garden as the case may be) all of the top web companies initiated some sort of Lifestreaming plan this year. I mentioned Google’s acquisition of Jaiku , but they seem to have let it flounder and have pursued other methods to break into Lifestreaming. Most notably they have done this by expanding the Google user profile pages to display data and other services (see my post on this) as well as the release of Friend Connect. Microsoft and Yahoo have also put their Lifestreaming plans in play with new features added to their Windows Live service and the launch of a social control panel respectively. Facebook slowly rolled out several incremental Lifestreaming features to their newsfeed but it’s a bit hidden and doesn’t appear to be doing a major push of it. Lastly I had reported on AOL’s entrance into Lifestreaming with the release of buddyupdates. Just weeks after that the announcement of the SocialThing acquisition came. For the trifecta they also made Lifestreaming front and center on their home page. I think it’s clear that all the major players see the importance of Lifestreaming for their future and are all trying to figure out how to best implement it. I’m sure we will see many more advances from each of them in the year to come.

Lifestreaming to Replace Blogging?

click for YongFook's Slideshow

Wired printed an article titled Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 which essentially discussed the new breed of Lifestreaming that is taking over blogging. The story garnered a large debate with 97 comments at last count. Wired wasn’t the only source for this debate. Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb posted a story titled The Future of Blogging Revealed where she discusses the current trend of Lifestreaming taking over the Blogosphere. Her story mentions an open source app dedicated to Lifestreaming called SweetCron which became very popular this year who’s author Yongfook had already proclaimed that the Blog is dead. Now while I don’t agree with that sentiment, I do believe that adding some form of Lifestreaming components to our sites has almost become a requirement.

Looking towards 2009

So Lifestreaming has really come a long way very quickly and although we’re not there yet, I think the foundation has been laid for it to make huge strides in 2009. I think Lifestreaming needs to go down 2 separate paths in 2009.

The first path is to acquire new users by having existing services and major players focus on making Lifestreaming as simple and straightforward a process as possible. They also need to continue educating users on the benefits of Lifsetreaming to encourage its use.

Now that we are good at easily capturing this mountain of data, we need to find creative ways of using it. So the second path is aimed more at the seasoned early adopters. We need to find better ways to analyze the data and provide unique and meaningful information from it. Part of this will include creating ways of filtering the noise to prioritize the meaningful personalized data for us that currently gets lost as the stream flies by.

2009 is going to be great. Now that so many of us have embraced Lifestreaming we are just looking for better ways to utilize it both personally and professionaly and the coming year should bring many innovations to help us coral this wild beast that was unleashed this year.

It was October of last year when I wrote about a Wired story talking about Plaxo Pulse that generated some of the first rumblings of Lifestreaming entering into the mainstream. Then in January I asked if 2008 would bring Lifestreaming to the masses. Clearly it had now become “Wired” which is a little scary as that sometimes means that something has jumped the shark. But I think in this case we’re not going to see that happen.

Now fast forward a few months later and some major notable events. Just a few weeks ago Facebook releases a site re-design which puts a heavy focus on the activity stream and the recently added abilities to import your data from other services and comment on them. TechCrunch proclaims that it’s The FriendFeedization of Facebook. This change by Facebook single handedly had the ability to turn millions of Facebook pages into Lifestreams overnight. Time will tell whether people start to import other services and whether Facebook continues commited to adding more services and functionality in this area.

Last week brought about the latest major player to throw their hat in the Lifestreaming ring when I discovered a new service from AOL called buddyupdates. The new service allows for AOL users to create Lifestreams and share them with their buddies on a website or directly in AIM. Another huge way to expose a giant userbase to Lifestreaming. It’s my opinion that AOL finally realized that the Lifestreaming phenomenon is here to stay and didn’t want to get left behind. Just to be safe, they also decided to snap up SocialThing a few days later for good measure. This appears to be a very calculated move for them to accelerate playing catch up in the Lifestreaming service game.

Lastly we must not forget the roots of Lifestreaming. It’s origins are from custom code that allowed us to host them on our own blogs and pre-date any of the services out there. Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb wrote a great post where she reveals the future of blogging and proclaims it to be Lifestreaming. Her post discusses and provides examples of how blogs are starting to leverage Lifestreaming functionality to re-invent themselves. Web services don’t provide the flexibility, freedom and data ownership that a blog can for Lifestreaming. I have provided several examples of unique self hosted Lifestreams and continue to write about them while providing information on the tools that make them possible. It’s this area that still excites and captivates me the most and I know we will see some great examples of that moving forward.