Archive for the ‘Lifestreaming’ Category
Introduction to FriendFeed for the uninitiated April 12th, 2008
I just came across this introduction to FriendFeed for the, as yet, uninitiated:
It was posted by Tim Steward over at Web2-Oh. Catchy name Tim.
Technorati Tags:
friendfeed, introduction
Posted in Lifestreaming | Comments (0)
TechCrunch and Loic Le Meur miss the point with FriendFeed March 30th, 2008
I noticed John McCrea’s post about this meme known as the “centralised / centralized me (depending on your language preference)” meme which has started to do the rounds on the some of the more popular blogs, like TechCrunch and Loic Le Meur’s blog.
Much of the focus is on FriendFeed and given that FriendFeed seems to be the new Twitter these days, this is hardly surprising but as I pointed out a little while ago, this idea of you as the focal point and origin of your many content streams is hardly new.
Michael Arrington and Loic Le Meur really seem to be missing the point here with FriendFeed. Arrington has the following concern:
But there’s something just a little weird about FriendFeed, some people are starting to mumble. It’s an aggregated “me” but it sits in a centralized site (in fact, centralization is kind of the point). FriendFeed is a (and hopes to become “the”) Centralized Me. It’s a data silo. True, it’s a friendly data silo, with APIs and RSS feeds to move some of the data around, but it’s ultimately housed on their servers, and always will be.
Le Meur pitches in with this concern:
The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service. Yes you can cross post or add badges, but it’s not really like a center feed in your blog. What I like about my blog is that it is my space, I own it, I can customize it and change it, I do not depend on anybody (except the software and host, TypePad of course, needless to say).
The value in FriendFeed is not as a centralised “data silo” but as one of many possible channels for content. Sure once you run all of your content feeds into FriendFeed then those content streams are centralised on one server but FriendFeed is merely one of the latest such aggregators to have surfaced. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, don’t forget about Jaiku, Tumblr, Plaxo Pulse and even the dubious Facebook (not to mention an even more recent entrant, Social Thing!). Each of these services can perform a similar function: aggregating and streaming your multiple streams of content, whether they be blog posts, images, videos or interesting feed items. If you make use of a few of these services as distinct channels of your content then the focal point shifts from these services back to you as the originator of the content.
FriendFeed becomes one channel out of many, each of which aggregates the content you posted to the source service (for example, Flickr, Vimeo and your blog). Your content is not centralised on FriendFeed, FriendFeed is one distribution channel for that content. The idea of a data silo just doesn’t fit with this model. Sure you don’t exactly own your FriendFeed page the way you own/control a page you set up on your own server or a hosted service but how important is that model of ownership when you remain the owner of your content and can distribute it on any similar lifestreaming service?
The “centralised me” is exactly that. I am the focal point, the centre of my lifestreaming experience on the Web. FriendFeed is just one of half a dozen vehicles I could use at any time and perhaps even use at the same time.
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lifestream, lifestreaming, centralized me, arrington, le meur, missing the point
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming | Comments (2)
You use FriendFeed, have you seen SocialThing!? March 24th, 2008
Just when you thought the lifestream service of choice was FriendFeed, SocialThing! is waiting in the wings and could change your mind about how you want to manage your lifestream. It is still in private beta testing at the moment and you can request an invite.
There has been quite a few seemingly inaccurate comparisons between FriendFeed and SocialThing! (like certain other services many of us use) and the SocialThing! people have published a “Semi-FAQ” which addresses these comparisons (in case you were wondering):
1. Socialthing! is not FriendFeed, and FriendFeed is not Socialthing!
This one is a question we always get: How are you different from FriendFeed? And how do we respond? Usually with one common answer: We have very different value propositions, and right now are being compared to each other because of a surface understanding of what we do. Socialthing! is and always has been about making your digital life easier. We bring your friends into one interface, make it easy to post stuff back to the networks, and just in general, try to make social networking easier. FriendFeed is about creating an interesting conversation around content (at least that’s our take on it). Two very different, very equally as cool value props. To us, the idea behind FriendFeed is not dissimilar to a forum. With forums, you have threads and then replies to those threads. With FriendFeed, the threads would be user generated content and replies being the comments and “likes” around that content.
There are obvious similarities because both services are lifestreaming services and both seem to enable you to add your various feeds and keep track of what your friends are doing too. SocialThing! published an interesting screencast showing how you can group together your friends’ various updates under a sort of consolidated line item in your stream (something which may appeal to FriendFeed users who are frustrated with huge numbers of updates using certain services).
My take on these lifestreaming services is that using a number of them can be a good thing. These services are really handy ways to publish your activity streams all over the Web and connect to friends (real and virtual) who may be using one lifestreaming service but not another. It also doesn’t take any more effort to keep multiple streams up to date than it does to keep a single stream up to date.
I’ll have to wait till I have a beta invite to use the service to try it out and opine on its benefits but for the time being I like the grouping option. The rest of the service doesn’t seem all that remarkable but that perception may change.
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friendfeed, lifestream, lifestreaming, socialthing
Posted in Lifestreaming | Comments (0)
Commenting for microblogs March 21st, 2008
One of the issues with some microblogging services is that you can’t really comment meaningfully on posts. Meaningful comments, to me, are comments which are linked to the source post and which can be viewed with the source post (so the ‘@’ convention in Twitter isn’t a meaningful commenting method as far as I am concerned - it is just too easy to miss out on responses and too time consuming to try draw them all together into a coherent comment thread).
A pretty good example of this is Tumblr which doesn’t allow for comments at all. That being said people are increasingly running their microblogging feeds into lifestream services like Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed which do have commenting functionality for incoming feed items. What seems to be missing is some way to link to a series of comments on a source post in, say, Tumblr which can be found in, say, FriendFeed. It seems to me that we need some sort of add-on (like the “Share This” plugin in WordPress) that can either be added to microblog templates or overlaid in a similar way CoComment can be applied to commenting forms on blogs.
Using this sort of add-on, people can read a post, click on an icon of some kind (or activate a bookmarklet) and link to the lifestreaming service of their choice to leave a comment which can then be made visible to the next person who visits the post. Perhaps this could be a sort of CoComment meets StumbleUpon type service?
Heck, this could even be applied to service that have commenting options available. The point is to make those commenting features of lifestreaming services more useful and to focus more attention on a lifestream than on the source content.
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lifestream, lifestreaming, comments, commenting, tumblr
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Infrastructure, Lifestreaming, Tools | Comments (0)
“Die Twitter, die!” March 18th, 2008
I love social media. I can post my thoughts about Twitter in FriendFeed on this blog and on Twitter and in the space of 18 minutes a debate has broken out and has largely finished. Current consensus is that FriendFeed ought to modify how it treats incoming tweets or perhaps even remove Twitter streams from the other streams.
That is an oversimplified solution to a problem FriendFeed didn’t create. It also presents a bit of a challenge. What about the people who use Twitter to answer that old question “What are you doing?” rather than as a very public chat room? Why should those people’s often pithy comments not be added to a lifestream in realtime or even excluded because other users use it for a purpose it wasn’t intended for and wind up flooding it with chatter?
And as for the way Twitter is being used, well, this response doesn’t quite cut it for me either:
I am all for people using these tools in ways that work well for them. What I am not in favour of is this sort of complaint that the way we have been using Twitter is working too well. Users are so used to it as a chat service that it is working a little too well even though it isn’t well suited for the purpose. The end result is a truckload of tweets of little real value out of the context of a conversation.
I am deliberately being sticky about this. Try again …
Technorati Tags:
twitter, chatter, uses, users
Posted in Lifestreaming, Tools, Web 2.0 | Comments (1)
Thoughts on FriendFeed and lifestreaming March 15th, 2008
ReadWriteWeb has a post comparing FriendFeed to a competitor still in private beta, SocialThing! (I don’t think it is really a comparison post because there is very little information about SocialThing!). I signed up for FriendFeed a week or two ago and it is a great lifestreaming service and does a couple things that appeal to me. For one thing there is a commenting feature which makes it possible to comment more meaningfully on items that may not have commenting features built in natively (a good example is Tumblr which lacks a commenting feature or even services like del.icio.us which are perhaps less about discussion and more about one way sharing). One benefit of something like FriendFeed which I think I have started taking for granted is the following:
FriendFeed has a bit of a head start, but even barring that, there are more intuitive features in place despite its visual shortcomings. The most notable is that it links you to your friends’ content even if you don’t have access to a particular service. The reason is that when you friend someone on FriendFeed, that person has generated an actual account on the service, so they’ve elected to port in all of their desired feeds. So my friends can read my Ma.gnolia links even if they’re a Del.icio.us users and vice versa. It’s in this feature that its real power lies.
With all the excitement about FriendFeed and the lifestreaming’s sudden uptake, it is important to bear in mind that lifestreaming has been around for at least a year or so in the form of services like Jaiku and, more recently, Plaxo Pulse (there are ongoing upgrades and improvements to Pulse so be sure to check back there often if you use the service and consider signing up if you don’t already).
I’ve been talking about lifestreaming for a while now and there seems to be a looming tension between content centralised on a single site (whether that be a blog, wiki or personalised/niche social network) and content that is distributed across a number of lifestreaming services. I have had most of my content streaming into Jaiku, Pulse and FriendFeed for a while now and I am curious to see whether the distributed model gains traction and I will start receiving comments on my comment in those lifestreaming services rather than on the source services? Certainly with content sources like my tumblelog, that is pretty much the only way to comment on posts (at least until Tumblr adds commenting).
If this shift does happen then we will probably see new advertising models emerge with the drop in page views and attention paid to the source sites generally. I am not sure how you would monetise a lifestream being run through a 3rd party service. Perhaps a revenue share option?
Another issue which I want to explore further is content licensing on lifestreaming services. There doesn’t seem to be much attention given to this at the moment but it is an important issue for people who, like me, license their content under something like a Creative Commons license. The services’ own terms regarding how content is to be licensed on their site will be important because they may seek to override a user’s own content licensing preferences. In fact, this will be an issue regardless of whether users retain all rights under copyright or they license their content under specific licenses. Either way, I’d like to see these services facilitate these licensing options.
I see lifestreaming becoming more prominent as services like FriendFeed become more popular and as that happens, it will be pretty interesting to see how advertising models shift and how people manage their content in this context.
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friendfeed, jaiku, lifestream, pulse, lifestreaming, socialthing, readwriteweb, advertising models, page views
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming, Sharing | Comments (2)
Pownce has more to do with email than Twitter March 9th, 2008
I use most of the new social web services that come out (at least the more popular ones) at least once. I have active accounts on Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce and I have found it a bit difficult to consistently stick to one service so I have been using all 3 in varying degrees. Not too long ago I used Jaiku almost exclusively until I decided to rather use Jaiku as one of a couple lifestreaming services I use (others include Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed).
I have tended to use Twitter as my primary “status” service and I have a bunch of contacts on Twitter already so it makes sense to keep using it. That being said, I really like Pownce (good design gets my attention) and I would like to find a place for it in my online repertoire that makes sense. A number of people cross-post to Twitter and Pownce simultaneously and if you see Pownce as a glorified Twitter then I suppose that makes sense.
Pownce and Twitter are both services I enjoy using and which feed into my lifestream services which are, in turn, intended to be convenient points of contact for people who want to keep tabs on what I am doing, saying and creating. So it doesn’t really make sense for me to have two identical streams of content running into my lifestreams.
At the same time there is tension between Pownce and Twitter and the groups of people who regard their preferred service as the better one. I can see how people could think that Pownce is a Twitter/Jaiku competitor (I certainly did for a while) but I don’t believe that this perception is accurate. Pownce’s competitors, if anything, are email and perhaps even tumblelogs although Pownce is really more of a messaging platform than a tumblelog lite. I listened to an interview with Pownce founders Leah Culver and Daniel Burka earlier today because I really wanted to get to the real business model as a way of working out where Pownce fits into my toolkit. I recommend the interview because, in it, Leah talks about her vision of Pownce and it isn’t to replace Twitter. It is a pretty flexible messaging service and given a number of suggestions that IM is going to replace email as the preferred communication tool of choice, Pownce as a messaging platform makes a lot of sense to me. So you can use Pownce as a Twitter-style tool but try thinking of it more as an email-style tool.
Heck, people are even using Twitter in ways that it was not intended to be used. Twitter is designed to answer a single question: “What are you doing?”. It isn’t meant to be a general chat service but because of features like the @ reply thingy and even direct messages, that is what it is used for daily. Me? I’d rather open an IM session for a chat. At least then I can better track what people are saying to me.
Anyway, you can find me on Pownce here. Feel free to connect to me.
Technorati Tags:
pownce, twitter, messaging, chat, intended use, leah culver, daniel burka
Posted in Lifestreaming, Sharing, Tools | Comments (3)
Is a 140 character limit so important? March 5th, 2008
I was listening to TWiT 134 and the discussion about Twitter and Pownce’s APIs and I started thinking about Pownce versus Twitter again. I know, I know, this is not a new story and I am going to try not to get into the same old one versus another debate here.
For starters I agree with many commentators who say that it isn’t a Twitter versus Pownce issue because both have their place. What I have been thinking about is the emphasis on 140 characters and that characteristic of Twitter as one of its benefits. I suppose being forced to keep messages short ensures (in theory) that you publish direct and pithy messages and that has value. I am not sure how big an issue this is for users. I have also seen Twitter become a kind of IRC channel and I am not entirely comfortable with that mainly because I got into Twitter as a status update service, not a chat service per se. That may just be me though and a function of Twitter not having integrated and threaded comments.
I understand that the 140 character limit on Tweets is primarily because sms messages in the USA are limited to 140 characters. Firstly our sms limit is 160 characters and it is probably fair to say that most people have phones capable of handling more than one 160 characters part in a message. I could be talking out my butt, I don’t think so.
Anyway, one thing with Pownce is that the messages are not limited. If you take into account the Pownce mobile site (m.pownce.com), the AIR desktop application and the site itself (not to mention what I understand to be a pretty potent API), I wonder what the importance of the 140 character limit is. Services like Pownce can do what Twitter does and a bit more so it begs the question what Twitter’s massive appeal is? The next question is whether Twitter’s strained infrastructure will have an impact on Twitter’s userbase?
I don’t really know what the answer is. I use Pownce and Twitter and have the Pownce desktop app and Twhirl (my current favourite Twitter app - also runs on Adobe AIR) running. I use both for different things and enjoy both. I guess time will tell how these services fare on the ever changing Web.
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pownce, twitter, 140 characters, musings
Posted in Lifestreaming, Tools | Comments (0)
Lifestreaming is all the rage back home March 2nd, 2008
I’ve been on a lifestreaming kick for a couple months now, in fact I’ve been talking about lifestreaming in one form or another since I started using Jaiku about a year ago. The basic idea is that a lifestream is a stream of content from a variety of services in one location so your friends/followers can visit one site and see which photos you uploaded, what your Twitter updates are, your latest blog posts and more. Here are a couple examples of lifestreams, they really explain the whole idea pretty well:
First, my Plaxo Pulse lifestream
Next, my FriendFeed lifestream
There are a couple issues and questions that emerge from what seems to me to be a surge of interest in lifestreaming. The one question I find myself asking is about the value of “traditional” blogging when much of the content people might blog about are fed directly into the lifestream. What I mean here is that before my various lifestreams (I think I have 4 or 5 running concurrently in various locations) I would blog about just about anything that happened that I wanted to talk about. If I took a cute photo of my puppies, I would blog about it on my personal blog. If I found a great link or blog post and wanted to mention it, I’d blog that too.
Of course there are services like Flickr, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon to do those sorts of things too but that also meant that my followers would have to subscribe to or visit each of those services to keep up to date. That isn’t really a big deal in this age of RSS feeds but if someone has more than a couple people to keep tabs on, the process of tracking all those feeds/sites becomes a pretty time consuming one.
Social networks like Facebook can do a pretty decent job of giving people a single point of contact. If most or all of your friends are on Facebook then you only really need to visit one site to keep up to date on what everyone is doing. It is a great idea the immense popularity of these sites is a testament to that. The big thing, for me, is being able to put my stuff out there and have multiple points of contact to enable me to reach out to the most people. Not all of my friends use Facebook. Some use Jaiku, Pulse and, increasingly, FriendFeed … just to name a couple examples. Facebook is great but it doesn’t really allow me to distribute my content freely so I plug my various content streams (such as Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, interesting feed items, bookmarks, Last.fm profile and many others) into my various lifestreams and create multiple (and hopefully consistent) update streams for my friends using those services. If course friends are free to subscribe to the original content streams too. These items are convenient ways to keep up to date of pretty much everything I do online.
So, back to blogging. With all this source content zooming through lifestreams of one sort or another, does blogging become less relevant? Would you blog less if you used a lifestream as your primary content distribution channel. Although this post has the makings of “Blogging is dead” post, I think anyone thinking along those lines is likely getting caught up in some hype and/or drinking too much of the Koolaid. As this post clearly shows, there is still very much a need for longer form blog posts or even blogs that are more customisable than the lifestreaming services permit. The value of a lifestreaming service is its utility and the content stream itself. Blogs can take it a step further and some bloggers create fantastic experiences on their blogs that enhance their posts. Lifestreams really won’t kill blogs, they will, however, help spread blog content further if you plug your blog feeds into your lifestreams. Each of the services we use have their place in our information/content creation activities, the challenge is working out those roles and using them effectively/efficiently.
As I was writing this post John McCrea (VP of Marketing at Plaxo) raised a really interesting issue in a comment on one of my status updates on Pulse:
I think there’s an interesting tension between lifestreaming in public and richly sharing with one’s family and friends. An interesting strategic question for Plaxo as to which is more important for us in the near term.
To me this question begs other, interesting questions about the value of more personal lifestreams to a service provider. There is a lot of focus on business and on people who are tech savvy and who don’t think twice about sharing everything with everyone but what about the majority of people who just want to share their stuff with their small group of friends or their family members and not the rest of the world? I don’t think there is enough attention on this invisible majority. Six Apart focussed specifically on these people when it released Vox which Mena Trott, one of Six Apart’s founders, said was a blogging service her mother could use. A lot of these people who are using the Web use services like Facebook and it works out really well for them. My mother in law uses Facebook to see what we are all up to. Introducing lifestreams to these people is the next step although it may still take a year or two before ordinary (as opposed to us geeks) people start exploring lifestreams more consciously (people who use Facebook are lifestreaming to a degree anyway, they just don’t think about it that way).
Depending on how you present lifestreaming to this massive potential group of users and how you build a sustainable revenue model around that group, this could be a tremendously lucrative model. It sounds a bit cold to talk about it that way but money is what keeps businesses, well, in business. Once the money is taken care of there is more time to focus on making the service appealing to these non-technical users.
These are just a couple thoughts I have had and I am sure there will be more ahead. What are your thoughts? Do you use any lifestreaming services? Are you going to try them out?
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blog, facebook, lifestream, plaxo, pulse, vox, mena trott, john mccrea, friendfeed, trends
Posted in Blogging, Blogs/Sites, Lifestreaming, People, Sharing | Comments (3)