ReadWriteWeb

In the past year there has been an explosion in social media. Where once we had only to worry about managing our Facebook or MySpace networks, we're now each creating a seemingly infinite number of feeds. The burden of this data is a lot to manage, but if social media is to remain useful, then steps must be taken to alleviate the strain of information.

One approach is to aggregate information about our and our friends' activities across all the networks we participate in at one location. Such locations are commonly called "lifestreaming applications." Two of these applications, FriendFeed and SocialThing!, have taken a particularly high profile in the past few days.

Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog is stepping into dangerous waters with a new experiment in mobile presence tracking through Bluetooth.

Demonstrated at the eTech conference today, m.mybloglog.com says it allows users to: "Bind your Bluetooth address to your MyBlogLog account and discover others nearby and [sic] find out if you have any shared interests. Meetspace keeps track of time spent with others so you have a running log of people to meet and things to talk about."

In our post 35 Ways to Stream Your Life, Josh Catone listed 35 apps that aggregate all the little bits of your online life. Commenter matthewvb sees some irony in the current craze for lifestreaming, pointing out that "a little over a year ago (Sept 06) when Facebook launched their news feed feature [...] it was met with huge resistance from the Facebook community." Yet now, aggregating details of what you're doing online has become a natural social activity.

The SXSW extravaganza in Austin has been an application king maker for the last two years at least; Google's Dodgeball blew up there in 2006 and Twitter went from elite-chic to massively popular there in 2007.

Who's it going to be in 2008? We look at five possible contenders below, taking into consideration the special magic that is the SXSW experience. Lots of startups are hoping they'll go big next week in Austin, but in all likelihood only one, maybe two, actually will.

It's a pretty good bet that if you're not making a Twitter or Facebook application, you're probably making a lifestreaming application. Okay, so not everyone is into lifestreaming, but it is one of the hottest areas for development out there, and there are an overwhelming amount of services offering a way to aggregate all the little bits of your online life (which, for the purpose of this post, is the definition of lifestreaming that we'll use). Richard MacManus wrote an excellent primer on lifestreaming in January, but we touched on just 5 such services. The purpose of this post, rather than to review, is to just list the various options out there.

Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog flipped the switch tonight on a major overhaul of user profile pages and now integrates activity data from other services around the web.

Less than a week after a small investment in the ex-Googler founded FriendFeed put lifestreaming on a lot of peoples' maps - the entry of a Yahoo! property could be a game changer in a market full of startups.

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.