Maybe you’re routinely updating your Facebook status, or you’ve been sending tweets from Twitter to make your thoughts known to the world. Surely you have a Flickr account and occasionally bookmark a website on Delicious.
The amount of social web services is increasing day by day. We use them and love them because we are an inherently social species. But even so this pace 2.0 is testing our time and ability to continually update our virtual lives. And keep up-to-date on the lives of our friends.
Enter lifestreaming – a natural step on the ladder of social media evolution – but this is not just another social time-consumer. Lifestreaming is sort of a toolbox where you can put all your existing social web services, and it will keep track of all of your updates for friends to see. In other words, lifestreaming is data being imported and aggregated from 3rd party services.
Admittedly the concept of lifestreaming is mostly aimed at making it easier for your friends to follow you, but seeing all of your updates listed chronologically in one place is personally gratifying too. It’s like you scatter personal puzzle pieces around the web, and lifestreaming puts them all together to form your virtual diary. Maybe there’s even some self-reflection in store for anyone trying to grasp the impact of web 2.0 on their lives…
As such lifestreaming has been talked about and developing for a couple of years, but there’s good reason to believe that 2008 will be the year that it gains critical mass on a mainstream level. There’s now about 30 dedicated lifestreaming services such as Friendfeed and Jaiku, but one of the most influential developments is probably that Facebook recently highlighted lifestreaming features in their re-design. You can now import data to your status update from 12 different third-party sites such as YouTube, Delicious and Last.fm.
The fact that Facebook limits which sites data can be aggregated from is something that annoys dedicated lifestreamers however. While the Facebook approach is paving the way and satisfying the mainstream audience, social media aficionados are awaiting the launch of Sweetcron – an open source lifestreaming application that is totally customizable to the data streams you choose. The fact that it’s possible to self-host Sweetcron is also something that’s making developers’ mouths water.
Methinks we can expect a tidal wave of life streams in the months to come – and I’m not the only one (see links below.)
Are you ready to stream your life? I dare you to comment.
Want to know more?
LabConfidential: Future of blogging is lifestreaming (Danish)
Good article on the new Facebook lifestreaming features (Danish)
ReadWriteWeb on Sweetcron
Website of Sweetcron-developer Yongfook