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.
I think 2008 is the year of the foundation of Lifestreaming, but i think that it is not the year for it to go mainstream i am going for 2009 simply because the kind of technologies that will make lifestreaming evolve (gps tags, geo tagging, location aware apps, etc) will be more common by then.
Excellent post! I also believe that lifestreaming will become mainstream in the next year or so… through Facebook millions of people learn what lifestreaming is (no matter that they don't know the exact term) and that will give a huge push in all lifestream applications and blogs.
I am excited!
i am not even sure Wired understood “lifestreaming” since they tired and expired stuff that a lifestream would aggregate.
The other point about lifestreaming is that it came to fruition thanks to the over-saturation of gimmicky social apps that flooded geek space. Now we are seeing big apps incorporate everything (features) including data aggregation. So you might see less people spreading themselves across the social web cloud to tack on features (web startups) they like.
Honestly, it feels like this blog sometimes tries to squeeze more juice out of it than there is.
Lifestreaming is basically just a presentation template for data aggregation. It serves a purpose but like online video, it's just a standard thing now. No big deal.
thanks al ot
your way is nice. good luck kanky 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. thats right..
thanks
thank
thanksss
thankss
thank you
Thanks a lot 🙂
Thanks a lot.Good information
I think 2008 is the year of the foundation of Lifestreaming, but i think that it is not the year for it to go mainstream i am going for 2009 simply because the kind of technologies that will make lifestreaming evolve
I think 2008 is the year of the foundation of Lifestreaming, but i think that it is not the year for it to go mainstream i am going for 2009 simply because the kind of technologies that will make lifestreaming evolve (gps tags, geo tagging, location aware apps, etc) will be more common by then.
thank you very much