Comments for Lifestrea.ms Is Attempting to Build the Future of Life Online

Lifestrea.ms Is Attempting to Build the Future of Life Online

2007-11-14T18:12:47Z

Lifestrea.ms is a powerful new lifestreaming service from Germany that you'll want to keep an eye on. It is a real testimony to the potential of the new web that anyone would even try to create something like this company has. Currently in private beta, I hope the company will fix its usability issues and launch soon. Send an email to beta@lifestrea.ms if you want on the list for an account.

Lifestreaming aggregates all your inbound and outbound activity online, see Tumblr or FriendFeed for other examples. For more on Lifestreaming check out our recent interview of David Karp, CEO of Tumblr, over at Read/WriteTalk.

If everything under the covers at Lifestrea.ms can be made as good as the front page of the site, then we'll be in great shape. That page alone is a marvel to witness. I've been on the other side of login, though, and don't want to go back until some things have changed.

An Open Aggregator, or Standards Based Nerve Center

Leveraging every open data standard and API I've ever heard of, Lifestrea.ms wants to serve as your dashboard for all your reading, writing and discovery online.

]]> They've got OpenID, they've got APML, hCard, XFN, OPML - you name it. It ought to be an opportunity to make all of these protocols easy to use for everyday users. OAuth would make the service even more powerful but they say they've got some proprietary methods of interacting with other services too. If it sounds like alphabet soup over there, wait till you see the mess it serves up. Usability is a disaster, unfortunately.

How It Works

Identify yourself at registration and Lifestrea.ms will assemble a list of feeds it thinks may be of interest to you. You tell it which of the feeds are correct and your profile is built accordingly. This proccess could use some more thought put into it. Why offer me just the feed del.icio.us/rss/Marshall+Kirkpatrick, for example, when there are any number of other permutations of that URL that are more likely to be of interest? (Like rss/marshallkirkpatrick.)

Once you've got all kinds of inbound feeds coming into your dashboard, you can discover other content and contacts - essentially using the product like an RSS reader and social network rolled into one. Furthermore, you can publish from inside Lifestrea.ms to the 3 big microblogging platforms, WordPress, Upcoming.org, Facebook, YouTube and more. It automatically synchs with Del.icio.us and says OPML export is "coming soon."

As you carry out all this in-and-out with information, your APML profile is assembled and can be exported at any time. Soon you'll be able to take that profile back and forth between services like Lifestrea.ms and Bloglines, Newsgator, Magnolia and more for instannt recommendations when joining one platform based on your interests expressed on the others. See Michael Pick's intro to APML today for more on this standard.

Beyond usability, the other thing Lifestrea.ms needs is a desktop or Rich Internet Application client. Something in Adobe AIR would be great so it can be cross platform. If there's one thing I've learned from Twitter (and there's a lot of things, actually) it's that no web page interface is sticky enough to keep me interacting with a service all day long - I need a dedicated app that sits above the other apps I'm navigating through. If somehow we could combine the code freaks at Lifestrea.ms with the design of Tumblr and the interface/usability bliss of Snitter - that company could take over the world.

Lifestrea.ms is currently in private beta status but hopefully the team behind it will make it usable and ship it soon. The vision is awesome - but the implementation has some important work ahead of it before it's ready for the public.

Comment from Adrian Keys on 2007-11-14

2007-11-14T19:05:03Z

I love the creativity shown in the company's domain but if I understand the writer correctly this is a site not yet ready for the "bright lights". If that is the case, then why bother?

Comment from Marshall Kirkpatrick on 2007-11-14

2007-11-14T19:39:43Z

Adrian, this industry is a competitive one and if I can offer an early look at a company that's breaking new ground in regard to trends of general interest - and provide you a way to sign up for access to an account when the private beta lifts, then that strikes me as one type of article that readers will return here for.

It's actually a long running debate, whether tech blogs should cover companies that aren't open to the public yet at all. I believe that we should. Plus I had a lot of fun writing this post, whether the site is ready or not. :)

Comment from Simon Goetz on 2007-11-14

2007-11-14T20:14:35Z

If correctly forged and implemented, this could be the thing to make my internet life a little easier. I'm already growing wary of new social networks and services just because each one is yet another potential time funnel. But this one, this one could be the digital equivalent of having my cake and eating it too, along with my pie, my salad, my meatloaf, and anything else I can stomach, and all on the same plate! Thanks for the fantastic article. You make me proud to live in this city of puddles and postings.

Comment from smorty71 on 2007-11-14

2007-11-14T21:47:04Z

Marshall,
You should check out Profilactic. We do almost all of things you mention that Lifestrea.ms does, plus our site is very easy to set up and use.

http://www.profilactic.com/friends_mashup/smorty71

Comment from Thomas Huhn on 2007-11-14

2007-11-14T22:04:27Z

Hi Marshall,

I'm overwhelmed by a load of (very positive) emails. Thanks a lot for this great article about lifestrea.ms.

You really understand what our vision is and there's almost nothing to add. I know about all the usability issues you named and we're working hard on it. Anyway I felt that with all this ongoing discussion of Facebook vs Google OpenSocial in terms of openness and portability of user data this is the right time to let people know that there are other ways to deal with this.

The interesting fact is that you only have to use the standards that are already there to get ahead of these major players and their proprietary solutions. 'Standards based nerve center' is a great abbreviation on what we're doing.

Btw: we are eagerly waiting for OAuth to get more incidence, but until now there's almost no service that we could use inbound or that could use our OAuth server outbound. Anyway this is on the list.

Cheers,
Thomas

Comment from Sam Sethi on 2007-11-14

2007-11-14T22:15:49Z

Great find Marshall. If the potential turns into reality then this will be a major application.

Sadly it only goes half way to the discussion Chris Saad and I had two years ago before APML.

a: selling YOUR attention value to trusted brokers/ open aggregators who in turn will sell the de-personalised information to advertisers and share the revenue back.

b: A discovery alogrithm based on aggregating my friends APML into a sinlge stream which enables discovery.

Comment from Thomas Huhn on 2007-11-14

2007-11-14T23:46:38Z

@sam sethi

I was really thinking about putting our revenue model on the table in my recent comment here, but I overcame the temptation and was willing to save this for a VC. Anyway, as I can see you've done this for me in your point a). ;-))

To put it serious: With lifestrea.ms we think to have a great basis to break new ground in sense of advertising models. It may be far too early to speak about this, but we want to be as innovative and open in sense of advertising as in any other sense. Let me give you some quick thoughts on that:

What we will offer to our users in the future (not during beta) is what we call a 'Shared Advertising Model': we do all the work in attracting advertisers, offering the technological platform and running the service and the user gets his fair share for allowing advertisers to get his attention. As with all his other data the user will always keep in control over who will see what and can always opt out completely of this revenue system (and all advertisements).

By creating an advertising solution as described, advertisers really have no chance to push boring stuff in front of the users eyes. Ads have to be like absolutely interesting hot topics which fit perfectly to the users attention stream. Otherwise he'll be kicked out of the users dashboard without a chance to get back in.

This benefits both parties: users will see these new kind of ads as beneficial information and an effortless way of being rewarded for their attention while advertisers will receive the highest possible interest for their products or services.

The average reader now might think of this like a re-birth of payed clicks and similar 'forced attention' models with all their unsatisfying outcomes and will doubt if advertisers are willing to pay for this.

But 'Shared Advertising' will be totally different from these Web 1.0 models: If the user wants to be part of the revenue stream, there's almost no way to fake his attention, as we can easily set quality levels depending on activity frequency for writing, uploading, communicating etc. If you would try to fake attention you would have a hard time to simulate standard activity patterns of average users on a daily basis, which is simply not worth the effort.

Comment from Michael Pick on 2007-11-14

2007-11-15T05:59:08Z

Thanks a lot for the linklove Marshall. Looking forward to having a good look around Lifestrea.ms and salivating at the prospect of the would-be killer app you've described here. Snitter+Tumblr+Lifestrea.ms? Sign me up.

Comment from Mihaela on 2007-11-15

2007-11-15T13:18:34Z

Have you already reviewed http://www.flock.com ? It seems to be the same idea... I'm curious what you think about it. I found it a good idea, but a bit tedious to set up.

Comment from ac@113.com on 2007-11-15

2007-11-15T16:23:42Z

OpenSocialSpace.com developing along the exact same line of [an obviuos] aggregation-based idea, scaling by way of Amazon's EC2 instances, to unveil in Q1 of 2008 according to my partners.. fyi.

Comment from ac@113.com on 2007-11-15

2007-11-15T16:25:10Z

OpenSocialSpace.com developing along the exact same line of [an obviuos] aggregation-based idea, scaling by way of Amazon's EC2 instances, to unveil in Q1 of 2008 according to my partners.. fyi.

Comment from ac on 2007-11-15

2007-11-15T16:28:23Z

Sorry for the duplicate post.. browser stuck, hit submit again after a long wait.. oh. Moderator most welcome to remove the last (and this) post.. regards, /ac.

Comment from Christian Scholz on 2007-11-17

2007-11-17T13:47:37Z

I had the chance to see a demo of this at the Web 2.0 Expo and it indeed looks like a great step into the right direction. Looking forward to check this out myself and see whether it really helps me or not or what might be missing.

Getting all your data together again and having also control over it is definitely getting more and more important these days.

As for whether you should post something like this here I would say you should, regardless how closed it is. It is some development which is following a trend and we all want to follow trends I assume.