Laander

While the blogging-trend seem to have reached it’s peak (or is that just being naive?), a new phenomenon is luring to be the “next big web thing”: Lifestreaming.

In brief, a lifestream is “a record of a person’s daily activities, aggregated from online sources such as blog posts, social networks and photo publishing“. The word Micro Blogging is about the same. The idea isn’t entirely new actually. Facebook might be the very first example of lifestreaming made available to the masses. The Mini-Feed updates combined with the ability to import content from other services (Flickr and del.icio.us e.g.), provides the ability to make online activity of the user available to friends. But this is just the beginning.

Many websites are already discussing lifestreaming and trying to predict it’s future. Here’s a few:

• Krynsky.com: Lifestream - Could it be the next big thing?
• Read Write Web: The future of Lifestreaming revealed
• Adactio: Watching the stream
• Steve Poland: IDEA #23 - Your Syndicated Chronological Life
• KK: Lifeblogging, An Inevitability
• Lab Confidential (in danish)

Who does it?

Enough of the talking already, let’s see how some of the lifestreamers do it themselves:

• Julie Allison: Julie became famous for her extensive exposure of her personal life. What’s particular interesting about her website, is the beautiful harmony between design and content. Her site scrolls horizontal, probably illustrating a chronological timeline, and contains different kinds of media - video, bookmarks, small notes and even personal e-mail excerpts. As ReadWriteWeb writes, Wired Magazine even brought an article about her discussing the Internet as a self-promotional medium.
• Yongfook: Also great use of design elements, that support and awakens the interest for his posts (stream).
• Cheslow: Another example of a somehow fanatic lifestreamer is Cheslow. This guy really takes it to the max, aggregating data from all kinds of sources. Check out his “where to find me online” list - impressive (or scary?).
• Krynsky: Yet another example of information flow from various sources

More here.

What does it take?

In order to lifestream, you need a set of content sources (obviously). I’m not sure which target audience I’m trying to reach here, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that all of us uses some kind of online services. Among the most popular are Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and del.icio.us. All of these encourage the user, you, to interact, store and add content in some way of another. Actually, Twitter IS a lifestream web application, that’s specifically designed to make small “quick posts”, thus creating a stream of content about your everyday life (you got it: life-stream). A more comprehensive list of services can be seen here, here and here - basically, everything that’s “feed-able” can be included in a lifestream.

Now, one of the biggest concerns for the average joe is the technical challenge of making this work as a published combined stream. Thankfully, christmas has arrived early this year. A great deal of free services have already emerged, making it extremely easy to make combine all your online activities into a single feed. Here’s the biggest ones I have stumbled upon so far:

• FriendFeed: great service that automatically collects all your services’ feeds, aggregates them and even gives you the ability to integrate this feed to your existing blog or social network service (bonus info: founded by ex-Googlers)
• Jaiku: Google’s new acquisition Jaiku seems very popular already.
• Tumblr: simple, yet effective - also very popular.
• Sweetcron: Yongfook’s lifestream app that’s available (or soon will be at least) for your own web server. This means you can run it yourself, customize it like you want and remain full data-control. 
• Wordpress plugins: a few different plugins have been made for Wordpress.

An extended list can be found here and here. 

Thoughts

The whole idea of lifestreaming is very interesting indeed, but none-the-less, a few uncertainties comes to my mind. Besides the many possibilities, I would like to emphasize a few topics:

Where’s the border between privacy and public availability? There are so much information that can be derived from the use of daily web services, that spying, phishing and spiteful Social Engineering is starting to emerge as an even larger threat. Security and control is an issue that needs attention. Another thing that I know could be my own Archilles’ heel is the amount of involvement and time required to maintain a lifestream (and read others!). A decent flow in the stream demands input from the social services. If the lifestreamer isn’t using these services on a daily basis or only uses a few, the idea is easily lost. An interesting discussion about these topics among others can be found at Just Seven Things.

Before I finish this post off, I would like to encourage my good collegue and friend Ulrich to bring up this topic on his blog Problogging.dk, as I think lifestreaming and blogging in general is very closely related. Anyhow, I’ll be keeping an upon eye on how the whole concept progresses and possibly also launch my own  stream here on the website