Not long after the Business Week article was posted, I just wrote about a Gordon Bell story in Wired this month and now Business Week ran one on him as well in advance of his upcoming book release titled Total Recall which covers the story of his “Lifelogging” project. For the last 10 years Gordon has used an assortment of devices to digitally record and store data across various aspects of his life including video, audio, and numerous documents. While we currently are aggregating data across social media sites to a central location, Gordon expands the concept to tracking personal data such as eating and workouts.

From the story

One goal for the early lifeloggers is to track and optimize performance, from the bottom line to the waistline. Bell, who has undergone two heart bypass operations, has analyzed his own data to draw correlations between his diet, exercise, and symptoms of angina—and to fine-tune his regime. Esther Dyson, a technology commentator (and an Evernote board member), predicts that markets will open for software to “extract order and meaning from the chaos of proliferating data.”

Here is a short video that accompanied the article

The article also mentions a device by Zeo that provides the ability to capture our sleep patterns and has a slideshow of various Lifelogging gadgets to help record other activities and provides much more detail into Gordon’s project. You can read the full story here.

TechCrunch ran a story on the SenseCam which was the primary device used by Gordon to do his Lifelogging. They talk about how this type of device is coming in our near future even citing a startup that should have one ready by 2010. The story continues on how they will become fashion statements and become as ubiquitous as a wristwatch. As is the case with any form of Lifestreaming such as this,  they rightfully discuss that the biggest challenges to adoption will be due to privacy concerns, but point to how our behaviors have changed with this as of late in the age of Facebook and Twitter.

Interestingly enough, Wired’s cover two issues ago was titled “Living by Numbers”. In it they had several stories about tracking our personal data across the areas of health, nutrition, and exercise to help optimize our lives. I recommend reading these articles as they provide detailed information on how this is happening today and the benefits gained.

I continue to see new devices and services to track this type of information such as Nike + and Garmin Connect. Below are two examples of these services used by Sean Percival and Micah Baldwin. The ability to analyze data to glean patterns and other important information to improve our lives is definitely appealing and soon to become another niche area in the evolution of Lifestreaming that can clearly show value to those willing to record and analyze it.

Image from Nike + run by Sean Percival

Image from Wii Fit workout on Garmin Connect by Micah Baldwin

Today I was reading the latest issue of Wired. In it is an interview with Salon Cofounder Scott Rosenberg about his new book Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters.

Rosenberg’s book researched the origins of blogging and goes on to discuss how it has become a phenomenon. Wired asks him several questions which include why did he need to write a book when a blog post would do which could have been followed with a rimshot. Other questions include whether he believes blogs have peaked, what impact Twitter has had, and what does he see the future of blogging becoming.

It is this last question that piqued my interest. Here’s the excerpt:

Wired: So what will blogging look like in 2019?

Rosenberg: The interesting outgrowth will be lifecasting. With traditional blogs, even if it’s easier to put stuff into a blog, you’re still selecting items. Lifecasting is an alternative where you’re pressing a button and recording everything.

Rosenberg uses the term Lifecasting which more often is used to describe broadcasting personal video but many people interchange the term Lifecasting and Lifestreaming and I’m gonna say he meant more than just video with his statement.

You can read the whole interview here.

Yesterday Wired posted an article titled 6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now. One of those technologies listed is Lifestraming.

From the story

Sites like FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and Digsby serve as social-network-activity aggregators. They’re like virtual funnels. Dump in all the notifications, feeds and updates from your various networks, and the services will bring it all into one master stream, relieving you of the responsibility of visiting a dozen or more sites to learn what your friends are up to, what they’re listening to, who they’re snogging and so on. Controls let you dial back the flow by sorting and filtering the flow, pruning it down to only what matters most.

The other 5 technologies are Identity Management, HTML 5, Firefox 3, Google Chrome, and Location Awareness. You can read the whole story here.

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.