I was playing with Six Apart’s Action Streams. It allows me to put a lifestream of all _my_ activities across all _my_ social networks into a single stream I can display on my blog.
Eh, that’s not what I want.
Friendfeed, the poster child of 2008, is similar to the Facebook newsfeed. It turns my _selected_ friends’ _selected_ (by them) feeds into a stream. This is almost like a stream of others’ Action Streams.
Eh, that’s not what I want. All these use _my_ stream or someone else’s stream that was consciously _assembled_, or these aggregate a collection of streams I need to actively collect into a new interface.
SocialThing on the other hand is more what I am looking for. It turns my existing _service streams_ into a stream.
How is that different?
Well, I use particular social services for a particular reason. Each service has optimized how I follow my network. Hence, for each stream produced at each service, there is an optimized interface for following and interacting with that stream. And each of those streams are set up in terms of privacy and access between members of that service.
Also, my networks in those different streams are not identical, since a different network emerges on each service due to the actions on those services. For example, my LinkedIn network is very different from my Twitter network.
SocialThing aggregates those separate streams using the logic that I set up in the service itself, connecting me to the folks I have already connected through those services, unlike Friendfeed, where I need to invite people all over again and see services of theirs I do not want to see.
How it should work is I identify the services I use and the streams from those services show up in one interface from which I can not only follow all these streams, but even allow me to interact (say, upload) with these streams. Also, with a bit of smarts (and maybe some help from me), it can make correlations between services, knowing who are the same folks in each (the overlap).
Either there is a service that does this or there is one in the making. It _is_ the year of the lifestream.
Other related articles from more accomplished people:
More like it is the year people try and create an identity layer that sits on top of your internet.
I use the phrase your internet because I no longer believe that there is one internet. The abundance of services and ways of consuming said services has brought upon an era of hyperpersonalization never seen before by the human race and to think something like FriendFeed or Jaiku or Plaxo or Beacon, etc., are going to some how make sense of the internet as you know it is not only incredibly pessimistic, but naive as well.
A-listers, B-listers, bloggers and people who make money by telling people who don’t get “it” what “it” really is are going to use such services, but are the masses?
h-e-l-l n-o
fix the identity problem, fix the privacy problem, fix the data portability problem, in that order and then maybe, just maybe, 2010 will be the start of the decade where the internet becomes something we can call our own instead of a service in the cloud somewhere being funded by ads no one clicks on or uses software to strip out of HTML.
Great post. I wonder what your perspective is on grouping your contacts? I can follow a bunch of people on LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, but when I aggregate these streams, I want to place my contacts into buckets. For example: friends, work, social media pros, Miami people … you get the picture. I haven’t seen this anywhere yet, even if CrowdStatus is making an initial attempt at that (which could be vastly improved).