Lifestreams: Yet Another Way to Share Yourself?

Lifestreaming, an idea stemming from the walls of Yale University, is getting more and more attention from the geeks and techies of this world. What’s all the hype about, we wonder.

What is lifestreaming compared to news feeds, dashboards and concoctions of random social media widgets? Is the idea still the same: share yourself, kill time, find long-forgotten friends and stay abreast of people’s status updates? Is it about tweeting, blogging, flickring, youtube-ing and digging it – all in one interface?

Lifestreaming Background

Lifestreams originate from Yale University, where the idea was conceptualized and developed by Yale student Eric Freeman under the direction of Professor David Gelernter.

Originally, it was conceived as a network-centric replacement for the desktop metaphor and inspired by the desire to organize one’s electronic life.

Freeman also wrote his dissertation in 1997 on the lifestreams software architecture, while completing his degree from Yale’s Department of Computer Science.

Later, the lifestreaming notion evolved and transformed into a social media reality, combining various social web activities under the umbrella of a single platform. Furthermore, there are even plugins created for lifestreaming from WordPress and Drupal. Check out this blog for more scripts, bits of code and plugins.

The Lifestream Universe

With the head-spinning variety of different social media applications out there, it is easy to get lost while trying to find an app that’s right for you. Chances are, you have already subscribed to a handful of them, but ended up using one or two for the sake of ridding the redundancy.

Some of you may find it daunting going to all of your virtual homes to separately update each one of them. This is when lifestreams come in handy, if you want to share your life from all sources automatically, making lifestreaming a possible answer to a bundled version of your web existence.

Facebook uses a lifestreaming approach in its new version, displaying all kinds of relevant activity going on in your circle: from who’s the hottest to what Nuno is doing right now — coupled with posted notes, videos, events, comments and wall posts.

On a tad more serious side, let’s look at LinkedIn. Same lifestreaming idea is here as well, with a touch of professional hue — who is connected to whom, who is hiring, who posted an expert answer, etc. Even such information as to who was poking around your profile and what job openings are available in your domain are also part of LinkedIn’s lifestreaming reality.

Lifestreaming Players

We will not even attempt to give you a full picture of the lifestreaming applications that are sprouting on the web every minute. But we will tell you about some strong players and hopefuls.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed, a hot lifestreaming start-up, offers an application that enables users to be on top of all their sharing activities.

Start with adding the FriendFeed app to your Facebook, and you can connect the two with all your other outlets of social web presence. Drop it onto your iGoogle homepage or read from a feed reader – FriendFeed is quite versatile. Keep on adding all those disparate accounts in the universe of social networking services and FriendFeed will put them all together.

The application also allows users to embed the feeds into their web sites and blogs. Frankly, nothing stands out in this typical feeder from the herd of similar services with the exact same agenda. But it seems to be popular at the moment.

Sweetcron

Still in development, Sweetcron is one of the newest applications on the lifestreaming market. It is a self-hosted solution that provides automatic updates of all your activities published to your blog(s): be it Flickr, Digg, or del.icio.us.

Lifestreams: Yet Another Way to Share Yourself?

Lifestreaming, an idea stemming from the walls of Yale University, is getting more and more attention from the geeks and techies of this world. What’s all the hype about, we wonder. \n\nWhat is lifestreaming compared to news feeds, dashboards and concoctions of random social media widgets? Is the idea still the same: share yourself, kill time, find long-forgotten friends and stay abreast of people’s status updates? Is it about tweeting, blogging, flickring, youtube-ing and digging it – all in one interface?

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