Lifestreaming: a ReadWriteWeb Primer
Lifestreaming, according to Wordspy, is "an online record of a person's daily activities, either via direct video feed or via aggregating the person's online content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos." In this post we review some of the top lifestreaming web apps: Onaswarm, Lifestrea.ms, Soup, Jaiku (the service Google bought), and perhaps the most popular of them all, Tumblr.
There's even a niche blog devoted to lifestreaming, called The Lifestream Blog. It recently noted that Wired magazine named lifestreaming a "wired" technology (as opposed to 'tired' or 'expired'). So it seems lifestreaming is the new black. Let's check out some of the leading lifestreaming apps...
Tumblr
For a recent episode of Read/WriteTalk Sean Ammirati sat down with David Karp, the founder of Tumblr. Tumblr is a platform that makes it easy to create Tumblelogs - which Wikipedia defines as:
A variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author's creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. One of the many tumblelog sevices is tumblr.
Onaswarm
Onaswarm is a new lifestreaming application from Toronto's David Janes and BlogMatrix. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote that Onaswarm is a smart, interesting service that combines groups, microformats and flashes of really good usability.
It's very text-centric and clearly better for geeks than it is for the artists who like Tumblr, for example. The Onaswarm site architecture and navigation need a substantial overhaul to improve usability, despite some nice touches.
Lifestrea.ms
Lifestrea.ms is a powerful new lifestreaming service from Germany that you'll want to keep an eye on. Marshall checked it out and said that it's 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, we 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. 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.
Soup
Watch out Tumblr, here comes Soup. According to Josh Catone, Soup is an easy to use tumble blogging application that includes two killer features: social networking (kinda) and outside activity streams. It's sort of a cross between Tumblr, Pownce, and a social activity aggregator.
At its core, Soup is a microblogging app, and a pretty easy to use one. Their tumble blog set up supports text, link, quote, image, and video posts. Sign up is a snap (you can actually begin posting to your tumble blog before creating an account), and like Tumblr, Soup blogs can be mapped to an outside domain.
Jaiku
Jaiku can aggregate and automatically republish stories from your other activity streams: blog posts, del.icio.us links, Flicker photos, even Twitter updates. In this regard, it is a lot like Tumblr (another service that has a huge lead on it traffic-wise). We think this is the part of Jaiku that Google was interested in when it purchased the site -- Jaiku as an activity stream aggregator, not Jaiku as a presence app.
We heard last summer about a Google sponsored project at Carnegie Mellon University called "Socialstream." Socialstream's goal was to "create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple network." The idea was basically for Socialstream to be a hub for all of your social networking activity -- whether that was on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, or Flickr -- all of your attention data would be collected in one place where you could manage and share it.
Finally, you may want to check out What's Next on the Web: a RWW Toolkit for 2008, which features Open Data as one of the 5 big trends Marshall Kirkpatrick compiled resources for. Lifestreaming is a type of web app that will benefit greatly from open data, so check out our toolkit to prepare yourself.
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I'd argue that Twitter is the most prominent amongst geeks at least. A lot of people use Twitter for lifestreaming.. with their blog posts getting linked in, using Seesmic to do videos, Twittergram to do voice, etc.
But the "biggest" is probably FaceBook. Okay, it's not really a lifestreaming app all on its own, but in terms of sheer numbers of people constantly posting their updates, places they've been, events they've been to, etc, it's the closest thing to lifestreaming in the mass market so far.
Good points Peter. I mainly didn't include Twitter because it's so one-dimensional compared to the others. That is its strength of course, but I just don't think Twitter streams one's "life". Maybe the pithy 140 character moments in one's life :-)
As for FB, good call. They are closer than Twitter, that's for sure.
what am i missing?
lifestreaming seems to be willingly opening up one's entire existence to any and all predators from targeted advertisers to the government
why do it?
Richard, love RWW and this is an interesting topic, but I can't help noticing you've adopted the tactic of disguised internal linking -- jaiku not pointing to jaiku.com but to your own page, etc. I was kind of hoping this battle had already been fought and won...
Best, Jeremy
@gregory:
First: most of the services mentioned here just aggregate things that are already publicly available on the web. In that case you can give people the 'bigger picture' about you and get together everything about you in just one place (you can even say 'you're building a reputation').
People that are interested in you can find out quickly what's your mindset. People that are doing research on you with something 'evil' in mind will have more energy to find out any detail about you anyway.
Second: because lifestrea.ms is able to digg deeper and retrieve information that is normally only visible to you, it also has privacy tools that let YOU decide with whom you wanna share your information.
You can even decide to keep it all for yourself. In that case you still have the benefit of aggregating your different accounts in one place, which can be a big time saver.
To give you an example: you can decide to share your private blog, your protected Flickr images and your protected Dopplr travel data with your family. In parallel you can choose to re-publish your del.icio.us tags to your colleagues and make your Twitter feed public. Just to give you the idea.
Lifestreaming done right puts YOU in control of your data and saves you time and effort.
Anyway it's always up to you which features you want to use and which not.
I'd like to suggest that we'll soon see a semweb-based lifestreaming app -- something that I hope can be showcased at STC in a few months.
I've been using Tumblr for this exact purpose since August, but have run into a few problems. The big one - since the release of Tumblr 3.0 back in November, they set a max limit of 5 feeds you can import into your Tumblr account. They say you can email support to add more, but I've tried multiple times without a response from their team.
Great roundup! I started using tumblr last year and was very happy with tumblr until recently when they decided to limit the number of inbound RSS feeds to 5. Are you kidding me? What's the point in using a service as a lifestreaming tool if they bottleneck the RSS feed imports. I know the original intent of tumblr was not as a lifestream BUT that is the reason they've been revived. I still use tumblr because I didn't know of any other service that allowed you to map custom urls. But thanks to your article I now know about Soap. I'll check them out and see how they are. Thanks again.
er...I mean soup. Sorry. Definitely tastes better than soap.
A great intro to lifestreaming. I second the endorsement of the Lifestreaming Blog - it was Mark Krynsky's jaiku channel that really fueled my interest in the term. I recently weighed in with a Lifestreaming 101 post on my blog Serial Consign.. not only touching on services & aggregators but acknowledging precedents and innovators like Steve Mann and Jeremy Keith.
all i want is a way to "watch" blog post comment streams so that when I join a conversation on a blog I remember about it the next day and can check what's happening.
i join so many conversations and then forget I joined.
Have you heard of
www.awdio.com
Check this out!!!!
Great roundup. However, I think you left out Spokeo and FriendFeed. For reading people's lifestreams, I think these are the two best services out there. Especially Spokeo since it's so easy to setup and use.
Are services like FriendFeed and Onaswarm catering to anyone other than celebrity tech bloggers and Web technology addicts (like myself)?
I personally know absolutely no one outside of the Web tech industry who uses more than one social networking service extensively. Facebook does a good enough job for the mainstream. Delicious, Flickr and Twitter simply aren't on the radar, so why would my friends need anything more than FB Newsfeed?
Why would anybody ever need a mobile phone?
@kayvaan I recommend you try Co.mments which offers what you want.
Thanks Richard for mentioning my Lifestream Blog. For those who have had their interest piqued by this post, there are over 30 sites, plugins, and scripts available to create a Lifestream including the ones mentioned here. You can also become very creative in what sources you choose to define your Lifestream. And if you're still confused you should be able to find answers on the site.
When I first started using Tumblr, I used it as a lifestreaming app, sending off all kinds of feed to it, but some time ago that changed, just around the time 3.0 came out (although unrelated to the feed limitations). Tumblr, IMHO, works best when you post content, not as a lifestreaming app. For that purpose, I have found Friendfeed to be just about right.
Very useful article and comments!
@Neil, most of my non-techie friends and acquaintances in their 20s or early 30s have have accounts on at least one other social network besides Myspace and Facebook. And Facebook posting is best done selectively.
http://www.livezuu.com is also a really cool lifestreaming service