The Year of the Lifestream
I should have written this post on January 1st, but I’m making it known today that 2008 will be the year of the lifestream, and FriendFeed is not the answer.
Like many, you probably have no idea what FriendFeed does. FriendFeed is currently ahead of the pack of a number of recently released web applications that give users the ability to get up-to-date information on what their friends are uploading, sharing and commenting on across the internet. Add your Del.icio.us, Facebook, FlickR, Youtube, etc. accounts to FriendFeed and it consolidates your recent activity. You then add your friends to FriendFeed, and you can follow them as well.
For other examples of this see:
FriendFeed.com
Correlate.us
Iminta.com
LuveZuu.com
MyBlogLog.com
OneSwirl.com
Profilactic.com
Socialthing.com
Secondbrain.com
But who cares? All the geeks are raving about FriendFeed. The geeks being the Internet celebrities (Just to name drop and hit those Google Alerts: Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Michael Arrington, Pete Cashmore) who’s personal brands rely on being way too active on the major social networks, Twittering way too much, and being way too connected to way too many people, as well as the web 2.0 crowd and the overly connected internet user.
I would consider myself as being in the web 2.0 crowd and being an overly connected internet user. I experiment with every new web application that looks remotely interesting, I have an account on just about every website that FriendFeed allows you to import, and I am still not convinced that FriendFeed will ever reach a mainstream audience.
Maybe its not FriendFeed’s goal to reach a mainstream audience, but there has been speculation as to whether or not FriendFeed can reach the tipping point, resulting in a user base that reaches “critical mass,” and I don’t believe it will unless the service is enhanced with reality mining.
Reality mining will make the concept of lifestreaming much more appealing to a larger audience. The rise of location based services combined with connected mobile devices will make reality mining not only possible, but efficient. Reality mining will provide an ongoing social graph of real information, instead of updates telling me that a friend has added the new Kanye West video as a favorite on YouTube.
By pairing online activity with reality, the data becomes much clearer. A service that meshes these two concepts together will be wildly successful.
My lifestream should tell me the cities I visited in 2008, the people I hung out with the most often, the music I listened to and found most appealing, the concerts I attended, the girls I dated, and the restaurants I went to. Some of this information is online, some of it isn’t, but the information that is online, aggregated by services such as FriendFeed, will be a part of this larger organized lifestream. It doesn’t all have to be made public either, however you should want to share certain parts of your life with those people who helped make the moments what they were.
With the rise of services such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, which allows you to share your location information with services and applications that you choose, and MyBlogLog’s recent addition of the ability to bind your bluetooth address to your account, the technology now exists to bring real meaning to your lifestream. Just this past week I got pretty excited using SkyDeck, a web application that downloads all of your cell phone bills and generates statistics on who you communicate with the most often, showing the complete breakdown of voice minutes and text messages to that person. The people are then ranked, and you are given the option to add more details to the contact’s profile. Enough API’s exist for services such as SkyDeck to allow for the creation of a meaningful lifestream.
Who is going to win the race and do it right?
