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Social networking overload - it's a common problem and one that it seems like it could be easy to solve. Thus there are countless attempts being made to build services that tie it all together. Some of those attempts are awful and one of those is a service we tested today called SocialU. RWW readers can try it out themselves via this link.
SocialU is a half-baked, condescending, poorly designed, ad-ridden lifestreaming app built in Adobe AIR. We'd refrain from writing about it, but the things we dislike about it seem worth mentioning and with all the frothy clone-like startups flying around on the web, who doesn't like seeing one that deserves it get a good blog-lashing sometimes?
FriendFeed, one of our favorite lifestreaming applications, launched the beta version of its new user interface today. The new version adds features that allow for organizing friends into different groups, which makes FriendFeed a lot easier to manage, especially for those who follow a large number of people. Also, you can now easily share photos on FriendFeed directly and see the home feeds of other users, which makes finding new friends a lot easier as well.
While there are many popular lifestreaming services out there such as FriendFeed and Profilactic, SocialThing! can be argued to be the more mainstream of them all, with a less geekier user interface and a more mainstream service focus. After snagging Bebo earlier this year, word spread that AOL was looking to buy SocialThing! Though it's only being confirmed again, we're wondering if lifestreaming is finally catching on to the mainstream masses.
Recently, we took a look at the growing trend involving lifestreaming and how more people are choosing to go this route instead of establishing a more traditional blog. But outside of certain celebrity lifestreamers like Julia Allison, the streams belonging to "regular folks" may serve more as a personal collection of content for your own reference instead of a site that's meant to draw traffic or readers. There's nothing wrong with that, though, and you don't need any special software to "lifestream" in this way either...all you need is a platform and an app. And there are at least a few apps from the iTunes app store that can help you get going.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the changing face of the blogging landscape. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger asked if blogging has lost its relational focus; Scoble explained why tech blogging has failed you; and even though not everyone agreed with his every statement, there was a renewed commitment in the blogosphere to return to blogging about what excites instead of just writing about "Apple's newest gizmo or the peccadillos of tech personalities." However, we're wondering if people even need to blog anymore...at least in the traditional sense.
SocialThing, a lifestreaming/social aggregation site, has been acquired by AOL, TechCrunch reports. We currently have no information about the final price of the acquisition, but given that SocialThing was still in private beta, we assume that it was relatively low. SocialThing was founded in 2007 with $15,000 in seed capital from TechStars. AOL seems to be rather interested in the lifestreaming and aggregation business these days. As AOL product manager Frank Gruber reported, AOL also just released its AIM BuddyUpdates yesterday.
If there's a hot new social media trend happening, you can bet that companies are trying to find a way to use it too. It happened of course with blogging, it happened with Twitter, and it is now happening with FriendFeed and other lifestreaming apps.
UPDATE: On August 16, 2008 ReadWriteWeb was sent a letter from the lawyers of a company named Fricken, which states that Fricken owns a trademark for the term 'brandstream'. Accordingly we acknowledge here that Pheedo did not coin the term, as we initially thought.
Indeed RSS vendor Pheedo has coined a neat term for this: brandstreaming [Update: Brian Solis notes in the comments that Pheedo probably didn't coin it]. Pheedo defines a brandstream as "a consistent flow of content created by a brand".
To back up its case for brands using lifestreaming tools, Pheedo points to a recent Universal McCann report stating that content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months. Overall, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher's site - through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices.
Not everyone loves FriendFeed - its social media firehouse qualities can lead to a lot of noise which can certainly be overwhelming to newcomers. However, even those who don't participate on the service may see the value of a lifestream. By hosting your own lifestream, you can easily share your current activities from across the social web with your web site's visitors. Once set up, it's somewhat like a passive form of a Tumblr blog. You continue your usual activities - upload photos to flickr, favorite videos on YouTube, bookmark pages on del.icio.us - and your web site will reflect those changes.
Lifestream.fm came onto the scene back in April of this year and was soon acquired by (once politically incorrect) social bookmarking company, Mister Wong. At the time of their launch, Lifestream.fm looked like just another attempt to compete with social media darling FriendFeed, and one that didn't really offer anything too special. But now that the service is under new ownership, they've been busy recoding, adding features, and fixing bugs. But have they done enough to warrant a second look?
Note: Check bottom of post for invites.
RSS is magic and the things we do online are often beautiful - so why are all the interfaces for displaying the feeds of our activities so ugly? Enter Swurl, a visually stunning system for displaying a timeline of your activities on various sites around the web.
Developer Ryan Sit specializes in leveraging the visual to create new interfaces for data, his ListPic application lets users browse Craigslist by images. Just like Listpic creates a whole new experience for Craigslist, Sit hopes that Swurl will make interacting with lifestream data a much more visually enjoyable experience.
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