Image courtesy of Superfeedr post on Federating PubSubHubbub

But this post isn’t to talk about that as I feel many have covered this topic very well. My interest really got piqued when I started to see many people get excited about a new project called Diaspora that was announced last week. This Facebook incident became the catalyst for a group to create in their words “an open source social network”. This team created a site with some basic information about their goals and asked for 10k in donations to help them get started. Word of their endeavor spread like wildfire and got a good dose of fuel when Leo Laporte deleted his Facebook account and announced giving a $100 donation to the Diaspora team. They have raised over $176k as of this writing.

It’s nice to see the attention that the Diaspora project is getting and specifically the plight of creating a decentralized and distributed open source social network. Unfortunately I don’t think that this team is the proper group to head up such an endeavor and I’m not alone with this sentiment either.

Chris Saad wrote a piece that captured my thoughts and feelings the closest. His post describes his personal experiences trying foster adoption of the DataPortability project and the roadblocks he encountered along the way to provide the real-world challenges the Diaspora team will face.

He takes the Diaspora spotlight as an opportunity to highlight what really needs to happen with this statement:

I think we need more fresh, independent voices generating hype and attention for the idea that an open alternative to Facebook can and must exist. Their success in capturing people’s imagination only shows that there is an appetite for such a thing.[Regarding Open Standards]… We all need to do our part to embed them into every project we’re working on so that peer-to-peer, interoperable social networking will become a reality.

Alex Wilhelm over at TheNextWeb took a different approach by breaking down the reasons why Diaspora is not the answer. Stating that their system will be too complex, points to why it won’t easily guarantee the privacy concerns that fueled the project, and questions whether people would be willing to pay for it. But ultimately he sees their endeavor as a positive one and wishes them the best of luck.

Lastly Jason Fried over at 37Signals took the brutally honest approach and calls their recent attention a curse. He points to the fact that they have now raised too much money, the spotlight is on them much too early, and the expectations are too high.

I agree with all 3 of these posts. I have watched Lifestreaming services progress for over 3 years now which in many ways have attempted to achieve what the Diaspora team is trying to do. I think having a system that allows us to tie together multiple web services we pick from a menu to post content in an aggregated fashion and tie in friends across these services in a seamless way is the end game.

Many talented teams have tried and failed at this with the closest team to do it being FriendFeed. I was one of the first users of FriendFeed and followed the site’s development and growth very closely. I made it a point to try and read all news written and listen to interviews with their founders.

The Facebook situation reminded me of several times that I recalled FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit discussing the need for an open and federated system to take FriendFeed to the next level. I remember when I attended his panel at SXSW in 2009 where he discussed this along with folks from Microsoft and the soon to be suitor Facebook.

I was able to dig up and re-listen to this Gillmor Gang podcast I remembered featured an interview with Paul Buchheit where around 7 minutes into the podcast he says the following:

“I think in the long term if what we are building here [referring to FriendFeed] is actually as important as we believe it is, it’s going to need to be an open and federated sort of system where there is multiple participants.”

It was a few months after this podcast that Facebook came in and bought FriendFeed. It almost makes me think that not only did Facebook want to acquire the talent from FriendFeed, but also diminish any further possibility of them making progress on an open and federated social network.

So where does that leave us now? Well I still think that as much as I and many other folks like the freedom and ability to totally customize your own social network in the way Lifestreaming services allow us to, it’s just currently an impossible task to simplify it for the mainstream. As bad as it may seem to have all the features and functionality controlled by a single entity like Facebook, it’s the simplicity, integration, and elegance that captures the mainstream and I’m sad to say it’s going to be a long time if ever before an open standards federated platform can be built in a meaningful way to compete with that.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t continue working towards this goal and I’ll be the first to be a cheerleader for those working on this endeavor. In fact ever since the Diaspora team has been gaining notoriety, I’ve been trying to swing the attention to the similarly focused OneSocialWeb project which I think is much more deserving of the spotlight. It was created by the proven development team of the very popular Storytlr Lifestreaming service which they released as open source to turn their attention to this project. You can read my post with information about their project to learn more.

Over the last couple of years I have seen my fair share of critics that post negative commentary about Lifestreaming. I feel that this is due to a narrow-minded view of what it is. This in part is due to the misconception that Lifestreaming is only about personal narcissm and vanity. Sure, that’s a part of it, but it goes far beyond that. There is so much negativity centered around the all too common stereotypes perpetuated by people who continually tweet about eating a sandwich. This alone has provided much of the cannon fodder for many to quip about the uselessness of Lifestraming. That behavior prompts many to state why the hell would would they want to follow any normal person’s life. Well I find most “normal” people I follow to be far more interesting than most celebrities that put their life on display nowadays, but that’s a different post.

In the sandwich example, there are many ways to add pizazz to that tweet such as incorporating external services that add context. If more folks did this, then it might help remove that negative stereotype but unfortunately I don’t think that lame tweet poster boy is going anywhere anytime soon. The bottom line is many will continue this behavior and…that’s ok. But providing personal details about our lives is only one aspect of a well balanced Lifestream. Sure it’s nice to provide that insight for others to learn more about us as a person, but there is so much other content and value that we can provide in our Lifesteams.

Spicing up a tweet linked to a service to add context and richer information

For most of the people who’s Lifestreams I follow, gaining insight from their personal posts is only part of the value. The other half of the equation is from all the content they highlight for me. So it’s the collection of the best content out there being curated by my social graph that provides value for me. So if we utilize these tools to share what we find and like as well as what we create, our Lifestreams become much more powerful.  Over time as we find the people who share the same topics and interests as we do, we build an amazingly powerful content network. That is the other half of what make Lifestreams so powerful that many fail to understand.

Examples of methods you can share to provide value in your Lifestream

• Sharing bookmarks using Delicious
• Favoriting videos on YouTube
• Reviews of restaurants on Yelp
• Checking into locations on Brightkite
• Adding movies to your queue on Netflix
• Reviewing books on Goodreads
• Post an informative tweet or share any of the above using Twitter

Robert Scoble wrote an interesting post recently that discusses the need to find better tools to allow us to curate our own Lifestreams. He states that we need to make it easier for people to incorporate photos, videos, audio to help tell our stories. I agree. There are currently several ways to Lifestream using services and platforms I cover here but for the most part it requires some knowledge and work. We haven’t quite lowered the bar far enough to penetrate the mainstream yet. Facebook is probably the simplest one stop shop at this point and finding a way to keep things simple and integrated like them would be the goal.

I left a comment on Robert’s post about an interface that my friend Kevin Sablan has mocked up to provide such functionality for curation across multiple media and services for news. But I also discussed that just as important as simplifying the tools to create the content for our Lifestreams, I see the ability for mining the data generated from them being just as important. This is something I’m very excited to see coming in the future and here’s an excerpt from my comment on Robert’s post:

But I also see a 3rd option in the functionality of curation that I would also like to see. An automated method to provide curated content across my various services that is built using my social graph (or followers on each of those services) If I could also tweak the dials to optimize it as well that would be even better. For instance it would be something like the FriendFeed best of day except more intelligent. For instance it could aggregate all the links sent out by my Twitter followers on a daily basis prioritized in descending order by how many of them tweeted the link and then perhaps even take it a step further by categorizing them by types of links. (e.g. blog post, video, photo) and perhaps even broken down by category.

The smart algorithms to curate content to help me filter and digest information from the firehose intelligently and help me not miss things is the main thing I’m looking for nowadays.

Writing about this subject has been simmering within me for quite some time. It was this post by Justin Clark which finally triggered the inspiration for me to finally write about this.

Here is what Justin said:

Lifestreaming is a trend that is only beginning to catch on. The potential of lifestreaming is huge. The problem is that most people have a tainted view of what lifestreaming is. The common perception is that lifestreaming is just a bunch of pictures, text and video broadcasting a person’s day to day life online; while it can be used like that, you’d better have a pretty interesting life if you want anyone to visit your site.

A lifestream can be so much more. A lifestream should be a collection of thoughts, ideas, opinions and more published online utilizing various media formats. The more people use online services like Posterous and Tumblr this way, the more valuable content will be available on the web. People will be more likely so post short thoughts and opinions that normal blogs would not be able/willing to post.

Lifestreaming adds a whole new level of value to the internet. I hope more people will use and embrace it.

I have a feeling that Justin is going to be a great Lifestreamer.

Previously to reading Justin’s post I had come across this post by Amy Mengel titled “Why are we all screaming for Lifestreaming“. She was asking how does Lifestreaming fit in between a blog and Twitter. This sparked a good conversation in the comments. While reading them I still continued to see the negative stereotypes that I read in so many other places, but the conversation was engaging. I decided to chime in on the conversation and bring my thoughts in.

So I just covered on some of the value I get from other’s Lifestreams but for some that may not be enough of an incentive to create one on their own. Well there are plenty of other reasons to create a Lifestream as well and I’m sure plenty more to come. I think it will continue to take time both for more people to begin Lifestreaming as well as people understanding the value of it. Ultimately it will fall upon tools that make it easier to do and add value as well as evangelists banging the drum for it to continue to make its way into more people’s lives.