Lifestreaming Apps miss the point
Posted: March 23rd, 2008 | Author: Jevon | Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
I have been playing with most of the new lifestreaming applications. SocialThing, FriendFeed and a few others.
This big deal about these applications is that they take activity information from a slew of social sites, such as Facebook, Flickr, upcoming, etc, and they bring that information all in to one place.
The image on the right is an example of my FriendFeed.com stream. You can see that it includes updates from Blogs, Twitter. If you could see the whole page, you would see images, bookmarks, messages and more.
I really liked the idea of a combined lifestream at first. The name “lifestream” describes the fact that these apps are all creating a stream of information about our online lives, and there is power in sharing what we are creating, curating and synthesizing.
The problem that is cropping up however is that these apps are probably better called “noise aggregators” or “NoiseStreamr”s than anything else. By the time I had friended a few dozen people on FriendFeed and started trying to keep up with their blog posts, twitters, del.icio.us bookmarks, Jaiku status and more, I start to feel like I am experiencing more of a info-avalanche than I am floating down a lazy river of socially relevant news.
I don’t think that this problem is inherent to information streams, but it is pretty obvious that these tools are in their infancy and a lot of art and science is going to have to go in to improving the information flow.
The most immediate thing they could do would be to provide a way for the user to offer feedback on what feed items are actually interesting to them and which ones are not. ie: If I give someone’s del.icio.us bookmarks a thumbs down every time I see it, then you should stop showing it to me. If I give a thumbs down on ever single del.icio.us bookmark I see, then make sure you never show me one again.
There is a clear trend toward data streams built out of my social network, but the focus has to be on reducing noise, not adding to it.
My name is Jevon MacDonald. I'm a co-founder of
Funny, I came to this post through FriendFeed!
But I agree in total… this was only my third or forth time signing in there. I’m not sure it has a place in my daily routine.
I also agree – still I think it has massive potential – there needs to be some kind of control of it though… I love the idea of presence through different apps – but you should be able to do other things than just being present and aggregated =)
[...] to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!I’m finding I have much the same response to these apps as Jevon expresses at his excellent blog, [...]
I also discovered this post via FriendFeed.
However, you can exactly do what you are asking for if you click the “More”-Button that comes with each item and click “Hide entries like this”!
[...] I played around with Onaswarm for the first time in a few months last night and there have been a lot of improvements. It is the only lifestreaming service that addresses many of the concerns I have expressed. [...]