Posts Tagged ‘Lifestreaming’
All posts tagged Lifestreaming.
Five years from now, we’ll look back on this and laugh. Or at least some of us will. Others are decidedly more cranky these days. But the great FriendFeed-Socialthing war will seem trivial compared to… whatever meme we’re obsessing over in five years. The funniest part of all this hubbub is that the CEOs of both companies don’t even view each other as competitors. After talking with both Matt Galligan at Socialthing and Bret Taylor from FriendFeed, it’s clear that the two companies are approaching a very real problem – information overload – in very different ways. In fact, it’s entirely possible for someone to use both services at the same time, with virtually no rips in the space-time continuum.
As Taylor noted, the end goals of the two companies are their key difference. FriendFeed is about content discovery and applying social solutions to the problem of information overload. Socialthing focuses more broadly on a user’s entire digital life, in an attempt to make sense of the myriad networks out there. FriendFeed is bringing the conversation in, while Socialthing is broadcasting it out. FriendFeed has morphed into a separate social network while Socialthing wants to help consolidate all the networks you’ve already built. FriendFeed, tomato; Socialthing, tomahto. Read the rest of this entry »
Conversations with fascinating people are, in my opinion, the best part of tech conferences. I haven’t even been at SXSWi 24 hours and have already hashed over: whether human-assisted tagging and metadata can be classified as semantic technology; the increasingly casual attitude we’ve all adopted toward our passwords; what it will take to interest the VC community in green technology (ahem); and, perhaps most importantly, how many breakfast tacos one has to ingest before complete diet integration is achieved. As a Texas native, I’m not a good judge of the last issue, as we begin eating breakfast tacos at birth. But a piece by Marshall Kirkpatrick today, along with an unpleasant experience with Spokeo two days ago, prompted me to tackle the password issue.
Frankly, I’ve become so used to giving my Gmail password to any social service that requests it, I don’t give it a second thought anymore. So when I decided to try out Spokeo in comparison to FriendFeed, I freely gave up my password thinking it would respond as expected: find some friends already using the site and prompt me to invite in others. Instead, it began trolling the Internet for all 500+ contacts I have in Gmail – including people I contacted once or twice on Craigslist – - and telling me of their detailed activity online. It felt invasive and downright creepy. Even worse, it contacted some of those people (not sure how it determines which people) and told them that someone was digging for info on them online, so they should 1) change their privacy settings on those sites and 2) sign up for Spokeo. (Not sure I grasp their messaging there. If everyone changes their privacy settings, Spokeo’s user base disappears.)
My friend Kelly, a super-smart developer in semantics, was one of those who received this email. We were discussing it last night and he made an excellent point that should be foremost these days and which I applaud Marshall for bringing up: a dangerously lax attitude towards our passwords is beginning to take hold in the industry and important initiatives like Data Portability and OpenID should be receiving much more support and attention. With lifestreaming taking hold – I’ll write soon about a hot company launching here, Socialthing – users and innovators alike need to keep the password issue top-of-mind. In the manic development atmosphere that has arisen around communities and social networks, the issues of privacy and security have taken a bit of a backseat. As a new era of all-updates, all-the-time is ushered in, we need to bring it back to the fore.
**Note: I haven’t talked with Spokeo yet for their side of the story and will post their side once that conversation occurs.
You no doubt heard the raves for FriendFeed in the last week, as the lifestreaming site opened up to the public and people quickly became addicted. As an early beta user, my addiction was broken somewhat with the public opening. The trickle of items became a torrent and, though I still check it multiple times daily, my explicit actions have slowed down. I’m only following 10 people at the moment and find it too much. (I can’t even fathom how Scoble is managing his 500+ streams.)
FriendFeed obviously hit a nerve, appealing to all the social junkies who had tired of visiting myriad sites every hour to plug into their networks. The market has been headed this way for a while; once social services expanded beyond Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, all bets were off. It was every user for themselves and woe to anyone who couldn’t maintain active personas across the board. In fact, back in March of 07, I predicted as much in a market analysis for The Guidewire Report.
…the verticalization of [social networking] will continue for the immediate future, until users reach a point of saturation and discover that they have run out of time with which to devote. It will be then that a new kind of… service/technology will need to step up, an aggregator of all our… content in one place. A master account…from which users can generate the content that feeds into the various and sundry vertical spaces…
That last sentence may be why users are beginning to struggle with FriendFeed. Maybe lifestreaming services are pointed in the wrong direction. Instead of feeding dozens and sometimes hundreds (competitor Profilactic has 135 services) of varied sites into an aggregator, why not reverse the feed and point the aggregator outward? Write your blog posts, add new media, post links and comment on items from one central site. Then your lifestreaming site plug-in blasts it all out to the hundreds of services. We already have favorite sites on which we spend most of our time – Facebook pages or personal blogs. Add FriendFeed as a plug-in to your favorite site and have it do all your socializing for you.
FriendFeed and Profilactic aren’t the only ones honing the lifestreaming model; for an excellent analysis check out Mark Krynsky’s Lifestream Comparison Matrix. Yahoo’s MyBlogLog just launched its entry into the space and iStalkr presents its lifestreams in a visually appealing timeline. And those are just the tip of the iceberg. The sector that set out to ease our social overload is already beginning to groan under its own weight. There is a very real, almost urgent, need for lifestreaming services. But perhaps we should stop and rethink the philosophy behind them before they become yet more noise in the social graph.
