Grasping the Lifestream

I recently came across the lifestreaming meme. I am not sure where it originated (who really cares anyway), but it effectively describes the aggregation of your contributions to the internet and those of people you care about (we are all makers now after all).

There is a blog dedicated to the subject, which was started in early 2007 appropriately called Lifestream. RWW provided a brief overview in Jan this year titled Lifestreaming: a ReadWriteWeb Primer, which highlighted a diverse set of products. This review was followed up at the end of Feb with a broader treatment titled 35 Ways to Stream Your Life. The focus of the review was on sites that aggregate your contributions and the contributions of your friends. Broader reviews are excellent for considering the general problem, the general solution, and various positions in the solution space toward improving the adaptive fit of the solution in its niche.

The notion is that such "lifestreaming" applications address the problem that new contributions you are interested in are made in a decentralised and concurrent manner. The general solution involves requiring the user to actively define the decentralised areas of interest in the web (that have remote access) and monitor them for changes of interest which are integrated and presented. Naturally, there are many tweaks on the approach, such as the cool idea of the application actively seeking areas of interest for you in lifestrea.ms, and performing search biased the contributions of yourself and your network in the proposed Delver (called Social Search). Google killer, hardly.

I gave the much discussed Friendfeed a crack. I can imagine the application addressing the proposed pain point if and when I have enough friends producing enough content I care about. Not yet though. My visits are low frequency across "the social sites", and direct communication and conventional syndication work just fine at the moment. This may highlight firstly the highly clustered nature of the paint point (the valley, popular people), and given the growth in the social application space, it suggests the likely flattening in the distribution in the future.

The first notion I had was that when such aggregation is useful, it will rapidly create a situation of "social network information overload" like my mail inbox and feed reader right now. I see the same thing with twitter and even social news. The only way to wade through the stream is with third party added value (meta meta meta...). The same solution will likely apply to the lifestream case, unless lessons are learned and integrated into the product.

A second more interesting point is the notion that such sites are successful if and when they trap traffic from the accessible "sites of interest". This was pointed out last month in a post titled The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere, where it was highlighted that traffic is stolen because the conversations are promoted on the aggregate not the individual artifact. Importantly, this conversational property is the basis of news aggregation sites as well, so it is reasonable to assume the model is viable for the lifestream pain point.

Finally, it is clear that the real value for these applications is the exploitation of the information about the individual across multiple sources, and the usage of such information in aggregate. Search and Ads are obvious, but the influence may exploited out the bounds of user interaction with the Internet (get ambitious kids!).