Will 2008 Bring Lifestreaming to the Masses?

I first started this blog back in March of 2007. I created it shortly after this post on my personal blog where I already felt that Lifestreaming had the right recipe for becoming something big. I was so intrigued by this new concept but as is the case in most early web innovation, the information and resources were spread out all over the place. I felt it was a great opportunity to create a hub for all this data and so the Lifestream Blog was born.

Initially this was a small club of tech savvy people that got involved early on, but it’s not even a year later and the concept has flourished in a huge way. When I created the site I wasn’t aware of a single web service that provided a hosted Lifestreaming service. Today I list almost 30 and I’m sure there are others tucked away or right around the corner. Lifestreaming has benefited from the fact that there has been movement towards the semantic web. The facebook platform was a huge success, but has suffered quite a bit of criticism over their “walled garden” approach. Luckily there’s a been a big push for open platforms and who better than Google to announce Open Social. While nothing has come of it yet, and who knows if it ever will, at least the seed of openness has been planted.

That brings me to today. I came across this post on Slashdot titled “Social Network Aggregation, Killer App in 2008?”. There are a few insightful comments as you would expect from Slashdot and even a few service shout outs, but interestingly enough the term Lifestream wasn’t mentioned until I chimed in with a quickie. Later this evening I was flipping through this month’s Wired magazine when I came across their Wired-Tired-Expired list to see that Lifestreaming had made it’s way to Wired’s top honor leaving microblogging and livejournaling in the dust.

All of a sudden I started to feel as if my favorite indie band had just gotten a top 40 hit. You know, it’s that feeling when the masses discover that great secret that’s yours and nobody else’s. You know, the point at which it doesn’t become cool anymore. Although in this case that’s not quite how it is. I’m more than happy to see Lifestreaming “jump the shark” because the more people become aware and adopt it, the quicker we get the resources thrown at it to give us the Killer Apps we all know we want. And I think that’s exactly what 2008 has in store for us.