Comments for The Lifestreaming Backlash

The Lifestreaming Backlash

2008-03-24T22:57:36Z

Backlash is probably too harsh a word, but as the buzz around lifestreaming continues to build, some people are starting to question where it fits into their daily lives. Last week, we wondered whether sites like FriendFeed solved the problem of information overload, or merely brought attention to it. Keeping track of all that activity is starting to feel like watching code in The Matrix, and this week, others are starting to feel the same way.

]]> Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman asks how the feed concept will scale. "I love the concept of the News Feed. I think it is an early implementation of the Implict Web, helping to break down the data silos. However, I'm now receiving hundreds of feed updates a day. And with the combination of (1) more users activating feeds and (2) more web sites offering them, I think that feed volume is poised to increase exponentially. And I can sense that ... the volume will increase to a level that will require 24 hour vigilence to remain informed," he writes.

Fellow venture capitalist Brad Feld voices similar concerns, in a post entitled, "I Need A News Feed For My News Feeds." The solution for each of them lies in the creation of some sort of universal feed dashboard that manages your social activity feeds and determines which items require action and which are of interest.

For consultant Jevon MacDonald, who thinks that lifestream aggregators are starting to become "noise aggregators," the solution to the problem lies in the development of filters that learn what you want to read. "If I give someone's del.icio.us bookmarks a thumbs down every time I see it, then you should stop showing it to me. If I give a thumbs down on ever single del.icio.us bookmark I see, then make sure you never show me one again," he writes.

Interestingly enough, it was Facebook that really pushed this whole activity stream idea into the limelight in the first place, and it is Facebook who seems to be taking an early lead in developing tools to filter them. The Facebook News Feed is already filtered algorithmically, and Facebook offers a couple of tools to help users tailor the filters to their interests (including the thumbs up/down method that MacDonald espouses).

According to Marshall Kirkpatrick, the concept of the News Feed has been a more important contribution to the social media space by Facebook than their vaunted platform. It could be that Facebook will also take the lead in tackling how to cope with the information overload that has resulted from the numerous activity streams we're now tracking on various social services.

To be fair, lifestreaming and lifestream aggregation is in its infancy. The Facebook News Feed only appeared about a year an a half ago, Twitter only gained real attention about a year ago, and FriendFeed and similar services are even newer. However, dealing with information overload is clearly a problem that these services will need to figure out how to address -- whichever does it best will likely be a big winner.

Comment from Fabian Schonholz on 2008-03-24

2008-03-25T00:25:15Z

The solution to the problem is "proactive search". Basically a global recommendation algorithm that connects the dots in your social graph and serves to you what you are more likely to want to see, read, hear, etc. All weighted and ordered.

I am writing a blog post on it. You will be able to find it shortly.

Comment from Aziz Poonawalla on 2008-03-24

2008-03-25T00:52:31Z

It seems that feeds are the new email - ubiquitous, universal, and useless for actually being informed - just swamped.

Google Reader fills with thousands of unread items if I neglect my feeds for just one weekend. I declare "inbox bankruptcy" more routinely than I do for my email inbox. And that's all just my website/blog/news feeds. A single friend's feed might generate as many entries as a whole week's worth of a regular blog. Perhaps its a truism that any new technology that is sufficiently cool is indistinguishable from email over time?

Comment from Jim (3.0) on 2008-03-24

2008-03-25T02:08:32Z

I still say the current social network metaphor itself is broken. The whole idea of "if I am friends with someone, then keep me up to date on what they do" is the issue. At ZLoop we felt that if, Instead of one monolithic network, I had a host of purpose driven smaller networks (Loops) I was in, which tied to my host of real life networks, then the 'feed' could come from what has been contributed to that loop itself...thus ensuring the activity has a purpose behind it and is therefore relevant to you. Long term, and for real productivity, this beats some system that spies on what my friends are doing, giving me info that is irrelevant 95% of the time (while still being highly entertaining and an incredible time waster...darn you facebook). Bottom line...in real life we don't interact as a member of one, monolithic 'friend' network. Instead, each day we navigate and interact within and between an unlimited number of networks.

Comment from 113.com on 2008-03-24

2008-03-25T02:15:10Z

It will scale, don't worry.

Comment from srini kumar on 2008-03-24

2008-03-25T02:42:32Z

facebook is a very clever company and one of its core values was "a clean look" compared to myspace. this aversion to clutter is threatened by things like the app ecosystem run amok and the need to accommodate advertising. they may well be solving problems that are several steps beyond their upstart competitors' thinking. that graphic EQ UI idea is absolutely genius, it deserves to be called out.

presence is a problem - because the more friends and the more networks people are part of (and as time goes on this goes up) the more cluttered "now" becomes. it's pretty exciting but the way you used watching threads in the matrix as a metaphor was genius. that's exactly what too much presence can turn into - lots of chatter about relatively nothing. oh well. it should be admitted that it is hypnotic - these are our friends, after all - and hypnotic media is what advertising has been looking for.

-srini

Comment from Luigi Montanez on 2008-03-24

2008-03-25T03:41:43Z

I think this boils down to services vs. standards. FriendFeed is great, but do we really need another service to aggregate our existing services? Another social network on top of our existing social networks?

This is probably a pipe dream, but if social media services all decide to aggregate and publish user activity data in a standardized way (say, AtomPub + Microformats), then users can use a client application to truly manage their own lifestreams, and the lifestreams of their contacts.

We use email clients to leverage the standards of POP, IMAP, and SMTP. We use web browsers to leverage the standards of HTML, CSS, and Javascript (some web browsers follow those standards better than others). We use feed readers to leverage the standards of RSS and Atom. Why should we not have lifestreaming applications that leverage a standard of their own? The closest work toward a standard that I can think of is Movable Type's Action Streams.

Comment from liquidsoap on 2008-03-24

2008-03-25T04:41:06Z

Information overload only occurs if you allow it to.Many people online accrue a set of social network friends that they are only very loosely connected to or not connected to at all in real life.To follow the delicious, facebook etc feeds of these random people will clutter your stream no end.
Also,the notion that you would require 24 hour vigilance to stay informed is a bit misleading.Social networks provide us with windows into peoples lives and interactions but that doesn't mean you always have to be looking through all of them.Say you use the metaphor of a real world social.One may be part of several conversations throughout the event but no one expects you to be part of all.In this sense,prioritisation on a personal level is key to taming your stream should be used in conjunction with filters to keep things on a manageable level.

Comment from Alvis on 2008-03-25

2008-03-25T12:03:08Z

Nice piece and sweet quotes.

From a broader perspective, information as a whole is
increasing exponentially and to cope we'll need to constantly evolve and better our inputting and sorting technologies and behaviors. As this is one of the most important human functions, this will be a very lucrative field, as you point out and as google has already shown. My hunch is that additional solutions will include (but not be limited to) the semantic web, better search, 3D info arrays, new interfaces that allow the computer to read your moment-to-moment preferences, etc. (See this piece I wrote up in reaction and re: the broader evolutionary context of the issue if you're interested. -- Sorry, the track-back function on our site is currently buggy.)

As 113.com puts it: it will scale, don't worry. It has to.
This is just the beginning of a crazy-fast web evolution.

Comment from islandinthenet.com on 2008-03-25

2008-03-25T13:25:51Z

I use FeedHub to filter my feeds. I can't seem to keep up anymore. If I skip a day or two I end up 1000 news items.

Comment from Henry Lewkowicz on 2008-03-25

2008-03-25T14:42:57Z

To effectively cope with the incoming streams of information I’m using my summarization application. At a click of a button I get to see the essential keywords and the most important sentences. Over period of time I found that looking at the instant information capsules gives me quite useful insight and saves me a lot of time. If you would like to try out summarization this is the product link: Context Organizer from Context Discovery Inc.

Comment from Paul Scrivens on 2008-03-25

2008-03-26T02:26:58Z

Call me weird but isn't the way to solve it is by taking in less information? If you have filters all you will do is pull in even more information because now you have a system that can handle it. Then you will need even more filters. As humans we either stop taking in the information or we continue to pull in more. No clue why we think we can handle it any better way than to not take it all in.

Just like adding more lanes to a highway...

Comment from Igor Schwarzmann on 2008-03-27

2008-03-27T16:21:00Z

>Last week, we wondered whether sites like FriendFeed solved >the problem of information overload, or merely brought >attention to it.

I never quite understood, how FriendFeed is the solution for the information overload. For me it was actually always a tool which is totally contra-productive.

Let's brake it down. For the sake of understanding the problem, let's take a prominent example: Loic. (Disclaimer: I don't read Loic in any way.)

So, previously I was reading Loics blog and from time to time I probably saw some of his flickr stuff, because he linked to his flickr page in a blog posting. If I'm one of those 1 million flickr users, I might even read his twitter feed, but not constantly, since twitter is not about the constant flow of information from one person.

Now I do have Friendfeed. And whoop, now I'm reading everything from Loic (I don't know if he really did place every of his feeds in there). Twitter, different blogs, Seesmic, flickr, ... and that's only one person. Just think about it, if every blogger you have in your feed reader start publishing everything he does through his feed. It would blow your mind or at least mine.

And for the sake of usability, did it occur to people that it's not person driven information we are looking, when we are trying to channel the information flow? On Twitter it's all about the person you're talking to.

That is not the case if we are looking for information. Let's take Techmeme for example. It's not about the blog which published it (and not about the author of this post). We're looking for fast, important information. Friendfeed does not supply us with that, it just gives us an activity meter of everything one person does on the net and pardon my french, but why the hell would I care for everything one person does on the net? I some rare cases, yes, but please, not all the time.

So basicly FriendFeed is doing exactly the opposite of what people are saying it does.

Comment from Shannon on 2008-03-29

2008-03-30T03:47:05Z

I'm using lifestreaming more as a discovery tool than an information overload tool. If there is a writer/blogger that I enjoy, who is reading and discovering information in the same arena that I want to read and discover, browsing their lifestream can be incredibly useful. And with more filtering options being created every day (like those from Internet Duct Tape), I'm finding services like FriendFeed to be pretty decent research tools.