Image courtesy of Flickr user Solderant (Bryce Glass)

The concept map was created by Yahoo Interaction Designer Bryce Glass. The image was uploaded to Flickr just today but it’s hard to tell whether this is for a project that is currently in development or for their existing Lifestreaming effort. Here’s a post from last November where I covered Yahoo’s entrance into Lifestreaming with their conversion of user profiles and here’s my profile on it.

But I’m not coninced that this is what the image above depicts. I did a little research and couldn’t find any references to a “vitality” platform other than this comment on a ReadWriteWeb blog post from Chris Messina. I just find it a bit odd that I can’t get any more details on this, but perhaps someone can shed some light in the comments.

These are Lifestream sites that I come across. You can view previous galleries here. If you or someone you know has a unique custom Lifestream, be sure to let me know.

Site: Sarah
Code: SweetCron

Site: CPB Group
Code: Nude (soon to be relased as open source)

Site: Ivan Campos
Code: Custom

Site: People from Fjord
Code: Custom

Site: Marcin Ignac
Code: Custom

Here’s a quote from Stephen’s post:

Lifestreaming is dull. Most people simply don’t have interesting enough lives. At best it’s a sequential record of random events recorded in a sentence or an image. To claim its anything else misses the point…my stream of images is boring as hell. But I make no apologies. It’s a personal record and it’s not intended to engage.

Really? Who made you the definitive authority on what Lifestreaming is and how it should be used? And who do you choose to call out negatively as the poster boys for Lifestreaming? Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel. Really? You couldn’t have picked two worse examples to try and make your point.

Sure there are many that use Lifestreaming to simply post the personal actions that occur in one’s own life and it’s perfectly fine if that’s how they choose to do it. But there are also many people that choose to weave in links to media and content that is associated with their line of work or interests they have. They do this both to alert followers as well as engage them. By identifying these valuable people, and building a list of them to follow, you in turn create an incredibly powerful human curated content stream. Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel epitomize this class of users whose Lifestreams I follow and to condemn them for it is ridiculous.

Stephen also goes on to say the following:

Likewise Stuart Bruce says blogging - not lifestreaming - is the way forward if you want to develop thought leadership. He makes the point that blogs are far more Google friendly than micro-blogs.

Oh puhleeze, as if the 90’s web was better than what we have today and using these new tools diminishes thought leadership.

The real-time web is upon us and with it comes the ability and tools to push out bite sized chunks of content. Utilizing these methods in conjunction with long form blog posts is an essential way to get your message and expertise across today. If you choose to ignore Lifestreaming concepts and don’t evolve and embrace these new methods you will surely become an afterthought during the next phase of the web.

Lifestreaming is a term that doesn’t adequately describe the complex concept of aggregating content, manipulating it, and packaging it for presentation. Hopefully people will begin to look beyond the most common stereotypyped usage of them to realize the many different beneficial ways they can be utilized.

example of Blurbits

I played around with the above Blurbit which can be found here and enjoyed navigating the map and discovering the associated content used to document each leg of the journey. Clicking on the previous / next links would refresh the map to the next location traveled, generate a content popup (photo or teaser blog post) and then refresh the frame below with whatever additional content was available. There are also several other funtions provided on a navigation strip to view the stream in different ways, along with the ability to view additional related content such as Wikipedia entries represented as icons based on geo locations. It’s a bit difficult to explain, so your best bet is to go visit the site and play around.

Using Blurbits to generate your own travelstream will require some patience to learn the system. The basic concept behind Blurbits is a set of online tools which requires you to learn and append custom URL parameters to the existing URL paths of their tools. You can view some examples and learn more about how to create Blurbits on this page. But if you really want to understand the complete toolset your best bet is to start by visiting the Blurbits introduction page that provides resources to the complete system.

It’s a pretty extensive set of utilities and I can’t really provide extensive info here, but if I’ve piqued your curiosity, it’s worth taking a look. Also, if you find using a Lifestreaming approach to document your travels interesting, then you may also want to take a look at this post I wrote which also covered another person putting together a tool-set to do something similar.

Jason writes:

So, I have to ask, what are you looking for in a lifestream theme? I created the things (specific to me) that I knew I would want, but I’m sure everyone out there has a different idea as to what they would want on their own lifestream…I probably will be making use of several plugins (recommended and required), but I want to put a list of functionality together so that I can style as much as possible to match the theme.

You can check out Jason’s Lifestream page here and provide him with feedback on his impending theme design here.

So I decided to do a quick mockup of what this feature might look like if it was built for FriendFeed. I borrowed the Google calendar and then just dropped in some ways that you could navigate through it. I chose the full month view which would primarily offer text links, but perhaps the weekly view could offer some nice thumbnail visualizations of data.

My mockup of a possible FriendFeed Calendar UI

Sure there are great timeline based Lifestreaming services such as Dipity, Lifeblob, Allofme, but they don’t offer the standard UI I’m looking for. Now defunct service Swurl had a somewhat nice Calendar view but I’d want more from one than they offered. My custom Lifestream built using Life2front offers another interesting timeline view, but once again not a standard calendar UI. Hopefully this feature will be either added by FriendFeed or another service soon as I think many would really appreciate the calendar metaphor for navigation.

Rosenberg’s book researched the origins of blogging and goes on to discuss how it has become a phenomenon. Wired asks him several questions which include why did he need to write a book when a blog post would do which could have been followed with a rimshot. Other questions include whether he believes blogs have peaked, what impact Twitter has had, and what does he see the future of blogging becoming.

It is this last question that piqued my interest. Here’s the excerpt:

Wired: So what will blogging look like in 2019?

Rosenberg: The interesting outgrowth will be lifecasting. With traditional blogs, even if it’s easier to put stuff into a blog, you’re still selecting items. Lifecasting is an alternative where you’re pressing a button and recording everything.

Rosenberg uses the term Lifecasting which more often is used to describe broadcasting personal video but many people interchange the term Lifecasting and Lifestreaming and I’m gonna say he meant more than just video with his statement.

You can read the whole interview here.

Lets get this out of the way quickly. While I may be one of the biggest Lifestreaming evangelists cheerleaders out there, I still would never consider killing my blog in favor of Lifestreaming. My initial love affair with Lifestreaming was due to the efficiency and elegance of providing content I created using multiple external web services. But for the most part I have a Lifestream to share a rich online diary that I can also use to reflect upon my past. But my Lifestreaming is only one method for how I want to tell stories whereas blogging provides a different one.

So why are many replacing their blogs with Lifestreaming? I think prior to the advent of Lifestraming and its tools many people created blogs with the sole purpose of providing a diary. In this case, I think it makes total sense to make the swtich. But this is only a portion of the blogging population. So what else is fueling this movement? I believe its a combination of several factors that are either individually or combined making it compelling.

Here’s a few:

• Lifestreaming tools and services have gotten very good
• Mobile apps provide great functionality for creating and posting Lifestreaming content
• The popularity of Twitter and other micro blogging services have consumed folks
• Facebook has turned into a Lifestreaming platform
• The advent of the real-time web has transformed user behavior (being quick and first has become more important than anything)
• Quanity has appeared to have trumped quality (volume! volume! volume!)
• People are embracing the lazy web

It appears that Steve’s conversion has really struck a chord and possibly become a wake up call for many folks. Robert Scoble who has been continously harassed about spending too much time using Twitter and FriendFeed and having neglected his long form went in the opposite direction stating his need to return to blogging. Louis Gray wrote a post stating that your blog is the foundation of all your activity which I fully agree with. I’ve had krynsky.com since 1998 and it will probably continue to be my main hub forever. Jeremiah Owyang also provided some good insight into Steve’s move along with the details of the ribbing he gave Scoble.

I read many more reactions out there on Steve’s announcement, but of all the banter I found, my favorite commentary came from Stuart Foster. He wrote a nice piece of which I fully agree with the following:

I’m not discounting any medium of communication. I’m merely urging those with interesting thoughts not to limit themselves to a more concise medium. Lifestreams are a great supplement to your blog and other long form thoughts. They should not be a replacement.

You can read some more of Steve’s subsequent posts on his switch to Lifestreaming which include:

• Frequently Asked Questions About This Lifestream
• A Lifestreaming Workflow
• Why Lifestream? To Model Leonardo Da Vinci

Just like any new search tool the first thing you are mandated to do is a vanity search. So when I searched for my name I quickly realized that the results could easily pass as a Lifestream for me. The results included recent Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Tweets, profile descriptions and more. Now I know this may not be the case for everyone, especially depending on how common your name and its associated results may be, however I found it to be very cool in my case and think it’s worthy of trying for yourself as well.

Beyond being able to use it as a Lifestreaming search engine, you can create really nice visual / informational pages on any topic or entity. Below are several examples to demonstrate this including The Smiths, X PRIZE Foundation (my employer), and Hamburger (my other true love).

After you receive the results page you can click and hold your mouse to scroll up and down as well as left and right to reveal more results dynamically as you scroll. This got me thinking that if these guys partnered up with the folks at Cooliris to provide a 3D visual interface that I might never leave my house. You also have an options page where you can choose whether to include results from various search engines and web services, filter results to include images, video, text, or all of them, or provide “safe” search results. Lastly they also generated related key words based on your search which you can then click on to view their results.

(options page)

Here’s a snip from the Spezify site with their description of the service:

We take web search further, away from endless lists of blue text links and towards a more intuitive experience. We want you to get a good overview of a subject, find useful information and be inspired with Spezify. We collect websites and are aiming to use as many relevant, free and open API:s as possible to generate extensive and diverse search results.

Spezify also reminded me of another nice visual search engine called Viewzi that you should also check out. When I went there tonight to take a look they seemed to have added quite a few more features and have progressed quite nicely since the last time I visited the site.

(my Viewzi results)

We are a visual culture and the nice mix of images, video, and text is a new interface paradigm that is becoming more and more common and seems to really be striking a chord with web  users. I really look forward to watching Spezify evolve and include a larger group of services in their results as they plug into more API’s in the future.

This is my lifestream page: a new feature that will soon be available to all Squarespace users. The whole world of social network in one place, completely customizable in all parts!

Taddeo isn’t the only only one that has been bitten by the Lifestreaming bug. Squarespace staffers Tyler Thompson and Eric Anderson have also created Lifestream pages (see below). I recently spotlighted Squarespace in one of my custom Lifestream galleries for a page they created where they aggregate the Twitter streams of several staff members (note they mention the new functionality coming on this page as well). They have also created a similar page for the staff of Revision3.

The only details I’ve been able to uncover regarding the new functionality they will be rolling out is from this post on Stephan Wetzl’s blog where he states

Squarespace will make soon a big update on V5 with releasing social widgets that let you aggregate data from across your various social networks completely within the Squarespace environment. This widgets let you create amazing Lifestream sites, so that your blog or website transforms to your personal social media hub.

When I first looked at how the Squarespace admin UI functioned I was pretty amazed. They also offer the ability to import data from existing blog platforms which include Wordpress, TypePad, Blogger and Movable Type allowing for a total transition. So with their upcoming functionality to create beautiful Lifestream designs, they should become a worthy new platform for anyone interested in creating a unique and custom Lifestream.

I’ll keep you posted on the release and will provide a full review once it becomes available.

Taddeo Zacchini Lifestream

Tyler Thompson Lifestream

Eric Anderson Lifestream