Back in the days of portals, we (the developers) tried to offer a bunch of services to the users like email, calendar, TV listings, news etc to create stickiness. Fast forward 8 years and we’ve realized that each service is specialized and one guy can’t do it all, so you have YouTube for video, Flickr for photos, del.icio.us for social bookmarking, Facebook for social networking, LinkedIn for business networking and so on. The main problem was if I have 50 friends who are posting on 20 different services, how do I keep a track of what’s happening.
Enter Lifestreaming. It allows users the ability to aggregate numerous services such as Del.icio.us , Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Pownce, Tumblr, and many others.So you can check what your friends are posting on the supported services. Of late we’ve seen a number of lifestreaming (or social aggregators) apps being released. FriendFeed and SocialThing are some of the popular ones and there are more cooking.
Facebook has recently announced a new feature that connects your lifestream into your mini-feed. Currently they offer importing Flickr, Picasa, Yelp, and del.icio.us info. However, in her blog on ReadWriteWeb Sarah Perez doesn’t feel it threatens FriendFeed.
“Just as Facebook’s status updates are no comparison to Twitter, this lifestreaming feature is no comparison to FriendFeed, but it may be enough for the average user”
All’s not not well in the Lifestreaming world though, says Laurel in her blog Social aggregator Sites
“Aggregators are similiar except they work best with low activity large networks or high active small ones. For example, I follow around 700 on Twitter and have 400 Facebook friends – I find most aggregators to be a soup. The challenge for Aggregators will be meeting the primary need of SNs – PURPOSE – effectively. I might log into Facebook at home for fun, and LinkedIn at work for business. Each meets my mood. Aggregators ignore mood mostly!“
Also if you’re following a sizable number of friends, keeping track of what’s going becomes difficult. Laurel suggests tagging friends “so I can can quickly check feeds for ‘colleagues’, ‘competitors’, ’stalk-this-hottie’, ‘family’, ‘important’, ‘not-important’ and so on“
This is an exciting space to watch.
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