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April 16 2012
How to Preserve, Prepare, and Produce Your Digital Legacy
We’re all going to die. We all create digital content and most of us have no plan for archiving our data for future generations after we die. These are two harsh realities that smacked me over the head when I attended a panel at SXSW this year titled “Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death“. The panel covered one of the most critical aspects that face us today in this newly minted digital world. The panel was moderated by Evan Carroll who both co-wrote a book and contributes to a website on the subject of the digital afterlife. You can listen to a recording of the panel here, follow along with the slides here, and read a summary of the panel by Evan here.
I highly recommend you follow the links above to experience the diverse speakers covering several different topic areas related to this subject. This is a very important subject matter with many different layers to it. I remember leaving the room inspired to identify some of the themes that resonated during the talk for me and write about them. Many of the issues discussed have been on my mind ever since creating Lifestream Blog. While I originally covered the ability to aggregate our digital data across disparate services I quickly realized that much of what I was publishing may never be archived in a way so that my future ancestors could be able to view it. I’ve already written several posts on the topic of how death and the future may impact our digital diaries and most recently referenced Adam Ostrow’s TED talk who was on the panel in a post.
After the panel I started to think about the steps we need to take to preserve, prepare, and produce our digital legacy. I began to break down each of these 3 steps to try and provide methods and tools to achieve them before we die. Each of these steps are very broad and can have many different approaches and strategies to deploy them. Below I will break each of these down and provide some insight on how to tackle setting up plans for each of them.
Preserve Your Data
Before you can make plans regarding how future generations will be able to access your data, you need to ensure that you’re taking steps to preserve it. The tips here are to employ an archive and backup strategy. This includes both making sure that your personal physical storage data is backed up as well as the data you are creating and publishing to online services. For personal data on your hard drives you can find many good tips and articles online to help you do this. I recommend creating a 2 step backup plan. Create backups daily from your personal computer (multiple in your family if you have them) to an external storage device. I’d recommend using a RAID NAS (network attached storage) so that you can easily have multiple computers running backup software to save their data to this central location.
There are many people that employ the local backup strategy but then stop there. This isn’t good enough because in the event of a fire or burglary you risk losing everything. So besides simply doing local backups, you must also add a cloud backup strategy. These services will let you automate the process of backing up your data over the internet daily to remote servers. By taking this extra step you’ve ensured an important and extra critical measure to preserve your data.
Backing up your local data is a measure taken for all the content you create that is stored there. So documents, photos, videos and more. You should try to identify and backup as much personally created data as you can. Richard Banks who was on the panel that our sentimental objects aren’t necessarily secondary to our mundane ones, which will help others understand our lives from the day-to-day minutiae we now can preserve.
But what about content you create on the web? I”m referring to services that include Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs and more. In this case you need a way to get that source data into a format that can then be brought down and archived along with all of your local data. There are some unique services that do just this that need to be included as part of your backup strategy.
Some resource examples for this step:
- Local Backup Strategies and Software articles
- How to backup your computer – Lifehacker
- What’s your backup plan – The 99 Percent
- Set up an automated bulletproof file backup solution – Lifehacker
- Cloud Backup Services
- Web Content Backup Services
Prepare a Data Access Plan
Airdrie Miller, who is the widow of blogger Derek Miller who wrote a gut wrenching farewell post before he died, discussed many of the challenges she encountered after Derek died on the panel. She told of not being able to access systems because she didn’t have Derek’s passwords and told of another situation having to deal with renewing a domain she wasn’t aware of. I’ve heard of the process of preparing all of this information for later access as creating a “digital will”.
Start by creating a detailed document with instructions on how to access all the digital data that you’ve been so good about preserving. Then I highly recommend creating a master password repository both for personal data and online data. Some of those passwords may also be linked to online accounts that are tied to subscriptions services such as blogs and domain registrars that will also require renewals and upkeep. There are a few online services that provide this as well as software. It would also be smart to have a designated digital trustee which would almost act as a data godparent to provide technical support in the event it was necessary. Accessing your data backups and working through services may be challenging for some family members so training and designating a technically savvy friend to help out in the event they’re needed will be helpful.
Some resource examples for this step:
- Detailed instructions document and digital trustee
- Provide information for password services / software with the master password to access
- Designate and train a digital trustee on accessing your data and passwords to help out
- Provide information for all on-going subscriptions to services related to digital data
- Password Services and Software
- Lastpass, 1Password (password services
- Legacy Locker, Entrustet (digital will services)
- KeePass (software)
Produce a Way to Access the Digital Archive
So now that you have ensured the preservation of all your data you need to create a good way to access all of it. This step can take on many different forms and will no doubt evolve over time into better methods we can only dream of. You should start by determining both the tools that lend themselves best to displaying the data in a way that you want, along with some good tagging and search capabilities. You also need to decide whether you only want the data to be displayed on a local computer or over the web as well. You may not find just one piece of software or web service to provide a method that suits you, and may need to incorporate several to achieve what you want.
Bill Lefurgy from the Library of Congress was also a speaker on the panel. He discussed many aspects related to “digital preservation” telling us they’ve built a website at DigitalPreservation.gov where you can find many resources on organizing your digital data. I dug around a bit and found several useful things including a whole section on personal archiving as well as a PDF with details for archiving and organizing several different types of digital media.
Some resource examples for this step:
- Digital Archiving
- Picasa, ACDsee (photo management software)
- Video Archiving tips
- Digital Archiving Web Services
- LiveOn, 1000Memories, Singly (software or service), ViewShare
If you question why we need to create a digital legacy I ask you to watch this great video created by the LiveOn service and also remember our lives aren’t just to chronicle what we do for ourselves, but it’s to provide a record for our future generations. I plan to create a dedicated “Digital Legacy” section on this site in the near future that I will maintain with updates over time as new software, services, and strategies become available for this process.
Update: Here’s another good video I discovered on this subject at another good site resource at DeathandDigitalLegacy.com
How to Preserve, Prepare, and Produce Your Digital Legacy
We’re all going to die. We all create digital content and most of us have no plan for archiving our data for future generations after we die. These are two harsh realities that smacked me over the head when I attended a panel at SXSW this year titled “Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death“. The panel covered one of the most critical aspects that face us today in this newly minted digital world. The panel was moderated by Evan Carroll who both co-wrote a book and contributes to a website on the subject of the digital afterlife. You can listen to a recording of the panel here, follow along with the slides here, and read a summary of the panel by Evan here.
I highly recommend you follow the links above to experience the diverse speakers covering several different topic areas related to this subject. This is a very important subject matter with many different layers to it. I remember leaving the room inspired to identify some of the themes that resonated during the talk for me and write about them. Many of the issues discussed have been on my mind ever since creating Lifestream Blog. While I originally covered the ability to aggregate our digital data across disparate services I quickly realized that much of what I was publishing may never be archived in a way so that my future ancestors could be able to view it. I’ve already written several posts on the topic of how death and the future may impact our digital diaries and most recently referenced Adam Ostrow’s TED talk who was on the panel in a post.
After the panel I started to think about the steps we need to take to preserve, prepare, and produce our digital legacy. I began to break down each of these 3 steps to try and provide methods and tools to achieve them before we die. Each of these steps are very broad and can have many different approaches and strategies to deploy them. Below I will break each of these down and provide some insight on how to tackle setting up plans for each of them.
Preserve Your Data
Before you can make plans regarding how future generations will be able to access your data, you need to ensure that you’re taking steps to preserve it. The tips here are to employ an archive and backup strategy. This includes both making sure that your personal physical storage data is backed up as well as the data you are creating and publishing to online services. For personal data on your hard drives you can find many good tips and articles online to help you do this. I recommend creating a 2 step backup plan. Create backups daily from your personal computer (multiple in your family if you have them) to an external storage device. I’d recommend using a RAID NAS (network attached storage) so that you can easily have multiple computers running backup software to save their data to this central location.
There are many people that employ the local backup strategy but then stop there. This isn’t good enough because in the event of a fire or burglary you risk losing everything. So besides simply doing local backups, you must also add a cloud backup strategy. These services will let you automate the process of backing up your data over the internet daily to remote servers. By taking this extra step you’ve ensured an important and extra critical measure to preserve your data.
Backing up your local data is a measure taken for all the content you create that is stored there. So documents, photos, videos and more. You should try to identify and backup as much personally created data as you can. Richard Banks who was on the panel that our sentimental objects aren’t necessarily secondary to our mundane ones, which will help others understand our lives from the day-to-day minutiae we now can preserve.
But what about content you create on the web? I”m referring to services that include Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs and more. In this case you need a way to get that source data into a format that can then be brought down and archived along with all of your local data. There are some unique services that do just this that need to be included as part of your backup strategy.
Some resource examples for this step:
- Local Backup Strategies and Software articles
- How to backup your computer – Lifehacker
- What’s your backup plan – The 99 Percent
- Set up an automated bulletproof file backup solution – Lifehacker
- Cloud Backup Services
- Web Content Backup Services
Prepare a Data Access Plan
Airdrie Miller, who is the widow of blogger Derek Miller who wrote a gut wrenching farewell post before he died, discussed many of the challenges she encountered after Derek died on the panel. She told of not being able to access systems because she didn’t have Derek’s passwords and told of another situation having to deal with renewing a domain she wasn’t aware of. I’ve heard of the process of preparing all of this information for later access as creating a “digital will”.
Start by creating a detailed document with instructions on how to access all the digital data that you’ve been so good about preserving. Then I highly recommend creating a master password repository both for personal data and online data. Some of those passwords may also be linked to online accounts that are tied to subscriptions services such as blogs and domain registrars that will also require renewals and upkeep. There are a few online services that provide this as well as software. It would also be smart to have a designated digital trustee which would almost act as a data godparent to provide technical support in the event it was necessary. Accessing your data backups and working through services may be challenging for some family members so training and designating a technically savvy friend to help out in the event they’re needed will be helpful.
Some resource examples for this step:
- Detailed instructions document and digital trustee
- Provide information for password services / software with the master password to access
- Designate and train a digital trustee on accessing your data and passwords to help out
- Provide information for all on-going subscriptions to services related to digital data
- Password Services and Software
- Lastpass, 1Password (password services
- Legacy Locker, Entrustet (digital will services)
- KeePass (software)
Produce a Way to Access the Digital Archive
So now that you have ensured the preservation of all your data you need to create a good way to access all of it. This step can take on many different forms and will no doubt evolve over time into better methods we can only dream of. You should start by determining both the tools that lend themselves best to displaying the data in a way that you want, along with some good tagging and search capabilities. You also need to decide whether you only want the data to be displayed on a local computer or over the web as well. You may not find just one piece of software or web service to provide a method that suits you, and may need to incorporate several to achieve what you want.
Bill Lefurgy from the Library of Congress was also a speaker on the panel. He discussed many aspects related to “digital preservation” telling us they’ve built a website at DigitalPreservation.gov where you can find many resources on organizing your digital data. I dug around a bit and found several useful things including a whole section on personal archiving as well as a PDF with details for archiving and organizing several different types of digital media.
Some resource examples for this step:
- Digital Archiving
- Picasa, ACDsee (photo management software)
- Video Archiving tips
- Digital Archiving Web Services
- LiveOn, 1000Memories, Singly (software or service), ViewShare
March 17 2012
Lifestream Blog Celebrates 5 Year Birthday Thanks to You
It was 5 years ago today that I created Lifestream Blog. It all stemmed from the fact that I became intrigued with the ability to find a way to aggregate content I created across social services into a single location. Furthermore, I wanted that content to appear in reverse chronological order. A digital social diary if you will. The original concept of “Lifestreaming” had been around but the application of using the web and social services as a method of implementation was very new. Back in 2007 there weren’t many ways that one could achieve this. I wrote a post detailing all of the research I had done to share with other people and thus Lifestream Blog was born.
Reflection
It’s been an amazing journey. When I created the blog I truly felt that this concept was something that was going to be huge. Within months of launching the site there was an avalanche of startups launched that aimed to bring Lifestreaming to the masses. I reviewed many of them and over time was contacted by founders to provide feedback and advice. It was an amazing time where you could see the evolution of this concept in various unique implementations. Initially most services only provided aggregation of RSS feeds but as the evolution of the web continued with the proliferation of websites providing API access to their services, we continued to see Lifestreaming services innovate.
Lifestreaming Services Peak
At it’s peak from 2008-2009 we saw the largest number of pure Lifestreaming services emerge. Leading the pack in terms of users and features was FriendFeed. These former Googler’s had created an amazing team who iterated often and created many cutting edge features that led to the creation of a great community. But in the end the service just couldn’t distinguish itself in a way to attract mainstream users to Lifestreaming and the droves of those potential people continued to join Facebook. As FriendFeed continued their mission, you could see new features pop up on Facebook that were heavily borrowing things that were being done on FriendFeed. Eventually FriendFeed saw their userbase become stagnant and in August of 2009 they were acquired by Facebook. In the end it was more about the talent grab as most of the former team were integrated at Facebook. I saw 2009 as the end of the Lifestreaming service goldrush. FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor eventually became CTO at Facebook and I see their recent launch of Timelines as the culmination of many Lifestreaming concepts by the integrated team coming to fruition.
The Evolution
From 2010 to now I have focused on several other areas related to the data we create on social services. I became very interested in how we can glean insight from the data and how we can filter and prioritize the massive amounts generated by the firehose. I became very interested in the growth of social magazine apps which allow us to connect our social accounts and use logic to filter relevant content for us. I’ve also become much more interested in Lifelogging and the Quantified Self. There are an amazing number of devices coming to market to track personal data as it relates to exercise, sleep, nutrition, as well as blood and dna analysis. I feel we’re on the verge of a huge revolution in pro-active and preventative healthcare. The evolution of these devices and services to analyze the data over the next few years will be amazing.
The Future
So what’s next here at Lifestream Blog? Well, I’ll continue to focus on what I mentioned in the previous paragraph and continue to bring insights and tips regarding social services and data. I also just got back from SXSW and saw a panel titled “Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death“. I’ve written about the aspects of Lifestreaming and death before but the panel really inspired me to give this much more thought. I plan on creating a new section here on the site soon where I’ll provide tips on the preservation, preparation and archival of our digital lives. I also will continue to monitor advancements in this area and report what I find. I feel that providing a digital legacy of our lives for both our family and future generations is critically important.
Giving Thanks
So that’s my update folks. I can’t begin to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed sharing my thoughts and discoveries here with you. I truly appreciate all of the readers that have visited over the years. You’ve provided great feedback and in many cases friendships were born from here. I never realized what a powerful vehicle this blog would become. I urge any of you that have a passion in life to create a blog and share your thoughts and resources with others. It will truly bring you amazing things!
Lifestream Blog Celebrates 5 Year Birthday Thanks to You
It was 5 years ago today that I created Lifestream Blog. It all stemmed from the fact that I became intrigued with the ability to find a way to aggregate content I created across social services into a single location. Furthermore, I wanted that content to appear in reverse chronological order. A digital social diary if you will. The original concept of “Lifestreaming” had been around but the application of using the web and social services as a method of implementation was very new. Back in 2007 there weren’t many ways that one could achieve this. I wrote a post detailing all of the research I had done to share with other people and thus Lifestream Blog was born.
Reflection
It’s been an amazing journey. When I created the blog I truly felt that this concept was something that was going to be huge. Within months of launching the site there was an avalanche of startups launched that aimed to bring Lifestreaming to the masses. I reviewed many of them and over time was contacted by founders to provide feedback and advice. It was an amazing time where you could see the evolution of this concept in various unique implementations. Initially most services only provided aggregation of RSS feeds but as the evolution of the web continued with the proliferation of websites providing API access to their services, we continued to see Lifestreaming services innovate.
Lifestreaming Services Peak
At it’s peak from 2008-2009 we saw the largest number of pure Lifestreaming services emerge. Leading the pack in terms of users and features was FriendFeed. These former Googler’s had created an amazing team who iterated often and created many cutting edge features that led to the creation of a great community. But in the end the service just couldn’t distinguish itself in a way to attract mainstream users to Lifestreaming and the droves of those potential people continued to join Facebook. As FriendFeed continued their mission, you could see new features pop up on Facebook that were heavily borrowing things that were being done on FriendFeed. Eventually FriendFeed saw their userbase become stagnant and in August of 2009 they were acquired by Facebook. In the end it was more about the talent grab as most of the former team were integrated at Facebook. I saw 2009 as the end of the Lifestreaming service goldrush. FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor eventually became CTO at Facebook and I see their recent launch of Timelines as the culmination of many Lifestreaming concepts by the integrated team coming to fruition.
The Evolution
From 2010 to now I have focused on several other areas related to the data we create on social services. I became very interested in how we can glean insight from the data and how we can filter and prioritize the massive amounts generated by the firehose. I became very interested in the growth of social magazine apps which allow us to connect our social accounts and use logic to filter relevant content for us. I’ve also become much more interested in Lifelogging and the Quantified Self. There are an amazing number of devices coming to market to track personal data as it relates to exercise, sleep, nutrition, as well as blood and dna analysis. I feel we’re on the verge of a huge revolution in pro-active and preventative healthcare. The evolution of these devices and services to analyze the data over the next few years will be amazing.
The Future
So what’s next here at Lifestream Blog? Well, I’ll continue to focus on what I mentioned in the previous paragraph and continue to bring insights and tips regarding social services and data. I also just got back from SXSW and saw a panel titled “Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death“. I’ve written about the aspects of Lifestreaming and death before but the panel really inspired me to give this much more thought. I plan on creating a new section here on the site soon where I’ll provide tips on the preservation, preparation and archival of our digital lives. I also will continue to monitor advancements in this area and report what I find. I feel that providing a digital legacy of our lives for both our family and future generations is critically important.
Giving Thanks
So that’s my update folks. I can’t begin to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed sharing my thoughts and discoveries here with you. I truly appreciate all of the readers that have visited over the years. You’ve provided great feedback and in many cases friendships were born from here. I never realized what a powerful vehicle this blog would become. I urge any of you that have a passion in life to create a blog and share your thoughts and resources with others. It will truly bring you amazing things!
December 29 2011
The Year in Lifestreaming for 2011
This year has been a tipping point for Lifestreaming. It has evolved quite a bit from the super geeky bailing wire and duct tape method of being a DIY project I started covering back in 2007. With advancements in technology, primarily through the proliferation of API’s, it has penetrated and mutated its way across the web. But the one place it landed to now become ubiquitous is with Facebook’s creation of the Timeline feature which has brought it to over 800 million people.
Facebook Timelines
There have been many ways of providing a presentation layer for a Lifestream. Early on most methods didn’t provide access to the long tail for a person’s posts. I wanted to see a calendar (or timeline) view to make a Lifestream become more of a historical record of the past. Several services started to pop up using the Timeline method and thus this digital diary metaphor was born. I believe it’s the most compelling form of Lifestreaming for an individual to be driven to create one. Providing the feature using a simple interface in a dominant social network has now brought this to the masses. I like to think that the knowledge gained by the FriendFeed talent acquisition is what helped propel Facebook to do this…and here we are.
During the early days of Lifestreaming there were many debates regarding its value. Initially services tried to become the hub of Lifestreaming activity and it was a bit difficult to realize the ways that content discovery would eventually become the catalyst driving so many people to do it. But over time the proliferation of API’s would bring about more sophisticated ways to take lifestreaming data and provide both great function and beautiful design. We now have many apps that are built on the backs of the Lifestreaming data people share across multiple services. We have social reader apps that aggregate the links we share on social networks, sometimes with some logic to prioritize the viewing order, and beautiful visual ways to display them.
The passive (aka frictionless) method of sharing was made popular this year by having the stream of our music listening habits from Spotify populate our Facebook Timeline. We’ve actually been doing this since 2008 by scrobbling from last.fm but only now is it a big deal as it hits the mainstream. Passive sharing is just starting to scratch the surface of where it’s going. It will become much more prevalent and start automating many of the updates to our Lifestreams.
Most passive sharing actions will come from apps on our mobile phones (soon with NFC) connected to our Lifestream. Path was another new entrant in the Lifestreaming arena with their revamped app release this year. The new version took steps to add passive sharing by posting updates in the background to our timelines based on monitoring our geographical location on our phones. Theoretically they could also monitor the audio to passively share our TV or movie viewing using Intonow technology. We will also see passive sharing coming from the stats behind our workouts, sleeping patterns, weight, and many other health based stats to Lifestreams coming from the growing popularity of Lifelogging devices. These devices will see huge growth as monitoring this data will provide health benefits including added motivation by sharing information socially.
As we move into 2012 it will be interesting to see how the Facebook Timeline evolves with many more third party apps populating it with data. I think the jury is still out on whether the Timeline will be a success depending on the usage and adoption. However, I am bullish on more innovation with mobile apps like Path coming and a new breed of services being launched to aggregate the health data generated from all these new lifelogging devices. It should be quite an interesting year as the Lifestreaming concept continues to reshape itself in line with advancements in technology. As always, I’m looking forward to watching it and sharing my findings with you here.
The Year in Lifestreaming for 2011
This year has been a tipping point for Lifestreaming. It has evolved quite a bit from the super geeky bailing wire and duct tape method of being a DIY project I started covering back in 2007. With advancements in technology, primarily through the proliferation of API’s, it has penetrated and mutated its way across the web. But the one place it landed to now become ubiquitous is with Facebook’s creation of the Timeline feature which has brought it to over 800 million people.
Facebook Timelines
There have been many ways of providing a presentation layer for a Lifestream. Early on most methods didn’t provide access to the long tail for a person’s posts. I wanted to see a calendar (or timeline) view to make a Lifestream become more of a historical record of the past. Several services started to pop up using the Timeline method and thus this digital diary metaphor was born. I believe it’s the most compelling form of Lifestreaming for an individual to be driven to create one. Providing the feature using a simple interface in a dominant social network has now brought this to the masses. I like to think that the knowledge gained by the FriendFeed talent acquisition is what helped propel Facebook to do this…and here we are.
During the early days of Lifestreaming there were many debates regarding its value. Initially services tried to become the hub of Lifestreaming activity and it was a bit difficult to realize the ways that content discovery would eventually become the catalyst driving so many people to do it. But over time the proliferation of API’s would bring about more sophisticated ways to take lifestreaming data and provide both great function and beautiful design. We now have many apps that are built on the backs of the Lifestreaming data people share across multiple services. We have social reader apps that aggregate the links we share on social networks, sometimes with some logic to prioritize the viewing order, and beautiful visual ways to display them.
The passive (aka frictionless) method of sharing was made popular this year by having the stream of our music listening habits from Spotify populate our Facebook Timeline. We’ve actually been doing this since 2008 by scrobbling from last.fm but only now is it a big deal as it hits the mainstream. Passive sharing is just starting to scratch the surface of where it’s going. It will become much more prevalent and start automating many of the updates to our Lifestreams.
Most passive sharing actions will come from apps on our mobile phones (soon with NFC) connected to our Lifestream. Path was another new entrant in the Lifestreaming arena with their revamped app release this year. The new version took steps to add passive sharing by posting updates in the background to our timelines based on monitoring our geographical location on our phones. Theoretically they could also monitor the audio to passively share our TV or movie viewing using Intonow technology. We will also see passive sharing coming from the stats behind our workouts, sleeping patterns, weight, and many other health based stats to Lifestreams coming from the growing popularity of Lifelogging devices. These devices will see huge growth as monitoring this data will provide health benefits including added motivation by sharing information socially.
As we move into 2012 it will be interesting to see how the Facebook Timeline evolves with many more third party apps populating it with data. I think the jury is still out on whether the Timeline will be a success depending on the usage and adoption. However, I am bullish on more innovation with mobile apps like Path coming and a new breed of services being launched to aggregate the health data generated from all these new lifelogging devices. It should be quite an interesting year as the Lifestreaming concept continues to reshape itself in line with advancements in technology. As always, I’m looking forward to watching it and sharing my findings with you here.
December 06 2011
Originator of the Lifestream Concept to Create an iPad App
There was a Wall Street Journal story on Saturday with David Gelernter who conceived the concept of Lifestreaming. It’s a great article and an interesting read where I came to learn several new things I never knew about him. More detail regarding the patent infringement lawsuits against Apple are covered which I touched upon in a recent video interview post about him. A new term he coins and goes into detail about is the notion of collections of Lifestreams in aggregate that he defines as a “Worldstream”.
image of David Gelernter courtesy of Read Write Web
From the article
Eventually business models based on streaming will dominate the Internet, he predicts. All the world’s data will be presented as a “worldstream,” some of it public, most of it proprietary, available only to authorized users. Web browsers will become stream browsers. Users will become comfortably accustomed to tracking and manipulating their digital objects as streams rather than as files in a file system. The stream will become a mirror of the unfolding story of their lives.
“I can visualize the worldstream,” says Mr. Gelernter, explaining its advantages. “I know what it looks like. I know what my chunk of it looks like. When I focus on my stuff, I get a stream that is a subset of the worldstream.
I too have often thought the business opportunities that could be built around the data generated by Lifestreaming. But we’re still in a phase of getting people to feel comfortable lifestreaming and developing methods to effectively tag and store the data. Facebook is trying to do this with the introduction of the timeline. They’re also trying to effectively catalog this detailed data with the development of the open graph. As lifestreaming and the resulting data becomes more ubiquitous, we should see these services start to come online. This could include vertical based lifestreams such as quantified self personal activity tracking (read paragraph 6 of this post)
In the article we also come to find out that David Gelernter and his son Daniel have created a new company. They’ve started to seek funding to create a product to bring Lifestreaming to the iPad.
From the article
The new venture, for which Mr. Gelernter is just beginning to seek funding, will focus on developing a lifestream product for the Apple iPad. “We like the pad,” he says. “A particular goal is to create a lifestream which aggregates the most popular social network streams, and includes email and stuff like that. It will generate revenues the way Twitter and Facebook do—by getting huge numbers of users, beginning at the place we know, Yale University undergraduates, who love glitzy new software. They tell their parents, who are big shots because their kids are students at Yale.” The new product will spread virally, forming a vast audience that can be sold to advertisers.
This is interesting. Entering the crowded world of lifestreaming apps and services will be very challenging at this stage of the game. I’m very curious to see what David Gelernter will bring to the table to distinguish this product from the rest of the pack. I look forward to monitoring this and bringing you more news as I discover it.
Originator of the Lifestream Concept to Create an iPad App
There was a Wall Street Journal story on Saturday with David Gelernter who conceived the concept of Lifestreaming. It’s a great article and an interesting read where I came to learn several new things I never knew about him. More detail regarding the patent infringement lawsuits against Apple are covered which I touched upon in a recent video interview post about him. A new term he coins and goes into detail about is the notion of collections of Lifestreams in aggregate that he defines as a “Worldstream”.
image of David Gelernter courtesy of Read Write Web
From the article
Eventually business models based on streaming will dominate the Internet, he predicts. All the world’s data will be presented as a “worldstream,” some of it public, most of it proprietary, available only to authorized users. Web browsers will become stream browsers. Users will become comfortably accustomed to tracking and manipulating their digital objects as streams rather than as files in a file system. The stream will become a mirror of the unfolding story of their lives.
“I can visualize the worldstream,” says Mr. Gelernter, explaining its advantages. “I know what it looks like. I know what my chunk of it looks like. When I focus on my stuff, I get a stream that is a subset of the worldstream.
I too have often thought the business opportunities that could be built around the data generated by Lifestreaming. But we’re still in a phase of getting people to feel comfortable lifestreaming and developing methods to effectively tag and store the data. Facebook is trying to do this with the introduction of the timeline. They’re also trying to effectively catalog this detailed data with the development of the open graph. As lifestreaming and the resulting data becomes more ubiquitous, we should see these services start to come online. This could include vertical based lifestreams such as quantified self personal activity tracking (read paragraph 6 of this post)
In the article we also come to find out that David Gelernter and his son Daniel have created a new company. They’ve started to seek funding to create a product to bring Lifestreaming to the iPad.
From the article
The new venture, for which Mr. Gelernter is just beginning to seek funding, will focus on developing a lifestream product for the Apple iPad. “We like the pad,” he says. “A particular goal is to create a lifestream which aggregates the most popular social network streams, and includes email and stuff like that. It will generate revenues the way Twitter and Facebook do—by getting huge numbers of users, beginning at the place we know, Yale University undergraduates, who love glitzy new software. They tell their parents, who are big shots because their kids are students at Yale.” The new product will spread virally, forming a vast audience that can be sold to advertisers.
This is interesting. Entering the crowded world of lifestreaming apps and services will be very challenging at this stage of the game. I’m very curious to see what David Gelernter will bring to the table to distinguish this product from the rest of the pack. I look forward to monitoring this and bringing you more news as I discover it.
December 05 2011
Path’s Next Version May Include Quantified Self Features
The new release of the Path app for iOS and Android has created quite a positive buzz. Much of it has been centered around the very beautiful design and UI. But the app has also pivoted down a different path (I know, I should be arrested for this sentence). Path originated as a photo sharing app whose distinction was the limitation of only being able to add 50 friends to your network. The new version has now expanded from simply sharing photos by adding the ability to share location (along with who you are with), thoughts, music, and declaring when you go to sleep and wake up. They also optionally offer the ability to passively share (aka frictionless sharing) new cities you visit as updates to your stream by monitoring the gps in your phone. They’ve also increased the sharing limitation from 50 to 150 to be within Dunbar’s limitation. This post doesn’t cover the full functionality and I’ll provide a link below if you want to read the many reviews on it.
I didn’t use the first version of the app because I was happily using Instagram and the only distinction I saw between Path and Instagram is that I could invoke a “velvet rope” group of friends. I’m pretty comfortable sharing most of my content publicly so this only distinction wasn’t enough of an incentive for me. I’ve now given the new app a sophomore try and the new functionality deemed by them as a “smart journal“ is an interesting new direction. This has been compared to Facebook’s timeline and I’d say that it draws some inspiration from it. The problem is that Path has the challenge of overcoming the network effect for it to become a Lifestream you can share with your closest friends. You’ll have to become an evangelist for the app by giving friends a compelling reason to add yet another social network to their daily routine.
I believe to truly use the app in the spirit it was intended for with tight friends requires an effort to treat it as a journal with private content you don’t share elsewhere. Treating it like any other social network seems to defeat the purpose. I’ve tried to use that app with that in mind, posting unique and more intimate things I don’t share elsewhere. But using the service without having many close IRL friends has left me with an awkward friending dynamic by mainly adding my early adopter tech friends whose relationships straddle that ambiguous line of acquaintance to friend. This could lead to usage that Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb pointed out it as a timeline to worship the self.
But there’s another interesting aspect to Path. It has started to tread a little bit into the world of Lifelogging with the ability to track when we go to bed and wake up. The problem is that it requires you to do this manually as an action within the app. This is tied into the app functionality and far from ideal. I’ve seen many people use this feature inaccurately trying to explain their long bouts of sleeping. A few months ago I reviewed the Bodymedia armband which is one of many Quantified Self devices that are now appearing on the market. Perhaps the next iteration of Path could be integrated to work with various of these devices to provide a hybrid platform for lifestreaming and tracking that activity.
Here’s a video Robert Scoble did with the Path team. It’s almost an hour long but I’ve set it to start where they do a demo of the app.
Around 9:15 of the demo Robert notices that co-founder Dave Morin has a Jawbone Up which is a new self tracking device similar to the Bodymedia, and Fitbit. Robert asks him about possible integration between the Jawbone Up and Path to which Dave answers “That’s something we’re very interested in”. Dave talks about the trend around mobile collection of health data including workouts and sleep aimed to make us happier and healthier people. He goes on to say regarding the Jawbone Up “…we see that as a type of data we want to get into Path…it turns out to be a nice way to understand who we should be working with”. He feels that since Path is a private and trusted network that this type of data would be a good fit. Alexia Tsotsis over at TechCrunch also voiced her wish with Path integrating with her Jawbone Up.
These devices of health self awareness are still in the early stages but I believe on their way to hockey stick growth in the near future. With this there will be a slew of new web service opportunities to compliment them. I already see a need for a web service that could aggregate the data from people that own multiple devices. So if we used a Zeo to track sleep, Runkeeper to track workouts, Meal Snap to track our meals, and Withings to track our weight, we could view all of the data in a single place. This would essentially be a Mint.com for health and mark my words we’ll see this type of service coming in the near future. If Path pursues this type of integration at least across a few simple data points with multiple health device integration they could be a first mover in this area and clearly have a distinction between anything on the market right now. This could provide a compelling reason for people to use it.
Here’s my original post about Path on Google+ which also provides links to many of its reviews.
Path’s Next Version May Include Quantified Self Features
The new release of the Path app for iOS and Android has created quite a positive buzz. Much of it has been centered around the very beautiful design and UI. But the app has also pivoted down a different path (I know, I should be arrested for this sentence). Path originated as a photo sharing app whose distinction was the limitation of only being able to add 50 friends to your network. The new version has now expanded from simply sharing photos by adding the ability to share location (along with who you are with), thoughts, music, and declaring when you go to sleep and wake up. They also optionally offer the ability to passively share (aka frictionless sharing) new cities you visit as updates to your stream by monitoring the gps in your phone. They’ve also increased the sharing limitation from 50 to 150 to be within Dunbar’s limitation. This post doesn’t cover the full functionality and I’ll provide a link below if you want to read the many reviews on it.
I didn’t use the first version of the app because I was happily using Instagram and the only distinction I saw between Path and Instagram is that I could invoke a “velvet rope” group of friends. I’m pretty comfortable sharing most of my content publicly so this only distinction wasn’t enough of an incentive for me. I’ve now given the new app a sophomore try and the new functionality deemed by them as a “smart journal“ is an interesting new direction. This has been compared to Facebook’s timeline and I’d say that it draws some inspiration from it. The problem is that Path has the challenge of overcoming the network effect for it to become a Lifestream you can share with your closest friends. You’ll have to become an evangelist for the app by giving friends a compelling reason to add yet another social network to their daily routine.
I believe to truly use the app in the spirit it was intended for with tight friends requires an effort to treat it as a journal with private content you don’t share elsewhere. Treating it like any other social network seems to defeat the purpose. I’ve tried to use that app with that in mind, posting unique and more intimate things I don’t share elsewhere. But using the service without having many close IRL friends has left me with an awkward friending dynamic by mainly adding my early adopter tech friends whose relationships straddle that ambiguous line of acquaintance to friend. This could lead to usage that Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb pointed out it as a timeline to worship the self.
But there’s another interesting aspect to Path. It has started to tread a little bit into the world of Lifelogging with the ability to track when we go to bed and wake up. The problem is that it requires you to do this manually as an action within the app. This is tied into the app functionality and far from ideal. I’ve seen many people use this feature inaccurately trying to explain their long bouts of sleeping. A few months ago I reviewed the Bodymedia armband which is one of many Quantified Self devices that are now appearing on the market. Perhaps the next iteration of Path could be integrated to work with various of these devices to provide a hybrid platform for lifestreaming and tracking that activity.
Here’s a video Robert Scoble did with the Path team. It’s almost an hour long but I’ve set it to start where they do a demo of the app.
Around 9:15 of the demo Robert notices that co-founder Dave Morin has a Jawbone Up which is a new self tracking device similar to the Bodymedia, and Fitbit. Robert asks him about possible integration between the Jawbone Up and Path to which Dave answers “That’s something we’re very interested in”. Dave talks about the trend around mobile collection of health data including workouts and sleep aimed to make us happier and healthier people. He goes on to say regarding the Jawbone Up “…we see that as a type of data we want to get into Path…it turns out to be a nice way to understand who we should be working with”. He feels that since Path is a private and trusted network that this type of data would be a good fit. Alexia Tsotsis over at TechCrunch also voiced her wish with Path integrating with her Jawbone Up.
These devices of health self awareness are still in the early stages but I believe on their way to hockey stick growth in the near future. With this there will be a slew of new web service opportunities to compliment them. I already see a need for a web service that could aggregate the data from people that own multiple devices. So if we used a Zeo to track sleep, Runkeeper to track workouts, Meal Snap to track our meals, and Withings to track our weight, we could view all of the data in a single place. This would essentially be a Mint.com for health and mark my words we’ll see this type of service coming in the near future. If Path pursues this type of integration at least across a few simple data points with multiple health device integration they could be a first mover in this area and clearly have a distinction between anything on the market right now. This could provide a compelling reason for people to use it.
Here’s my original post about Path on Google+ which also provides links to many of its reviews.
November 10 2011
David Galernter Video Interview on Technology, Innovations, and Lifestreaming
If you frequent this blog then you probably know that David Galernter originated the Lifestreaming concept and dubbed its name. His original concept has come a long way from its inception in 1996 and a culmination is coming soon when Facebook will bring this concept to 800 Million+ users ushering it into the mainstream.
I just recently came across this interview of David on Big Think from March of last year. It covers questions about the future of technological innovation, print media’s future, and Lifestreaming. The question that was asked is “What is “lifestreaming,” and are modern social networking tools making it universal?”
His answer covered several areas. He begins by discussing the origins of Lifestreaming and then covers how he can no longer talk about its commercialization. He abruptly states how he can’t discuss some aspects due to patents. Apparently there are patents that David doesn’t own surrounding the concept that have resulted in a lawsuit against Apple. He’s heard that this patent dispute is the largest lawsuit in patent history. He describes how these patents revolve around the implementation and user interface design of Cover Flow, Spotlight, and Time Machine. I don’t know anything about these patent issues but it will be interesting to see if Facebook will soon become a target of them as well.
He goes on to state this
Without commenting on the legal aspects, which I’m not capable of doing, those are lifestreams and there are other companies that have done similar things. That makes me angry personally, not because of the money, but because of the deliberate failure to acknowledge work that we would have made freely available as academics and that companies will not acknowledge because there is so much money involved.
This really is a shame. David goes on to talk about how he’s excited about how the Lifestreaming concept has proliferated across personal sites and commercial services and specifically mentions FriendFeed, AOL, and Bebo. I was also humbled by the fact that I think this blog got a shout out in the interview which is great.
He closes the question by returning to the patent issue and states this
It’s not as if we want to stop that activity – shut it down, but we’d like to see credit where credit is due. Not just to me, or mainly to me, but to graduates who’ve actually built the software, worked tremendously hard, published the papers, put them in – you know, made them available, and we’d like to see credit awarded.
You can view a video of the interview on the Big Think site. Note: the Lifestreaming question comes in at 3:45 of the video. There’s also a full transcript of the interview available as well.
David Galernter Video Interview on Technology, Innovations, and Lifestreaming
If you frequent this blog then you probably know that David Galernter originated the Lifestreaming concept and dubbed its name. His original concept has come a long way from its inception in 1996 and a culmination is coming soon when Facebook will bring this concept to 800 Million+ users ushering it into the mainstream.
I just recently came across this interview of David on Big Think from March of last year. It covers questions about the future of technological innovation, print media’s future, and Lifestreaming. The question that was asked is “What is “lifestreaming,” and are modern social networking tools making it universal?”
His answer covered several areas. He begins by discussing the origins of Lifestreaming and then covers how he can no longer talk about its commercialization. He abruptly states how he can’t discuss some aspects due to patents. Apparently there are patents that David doesn’t own surrounding the concept that have resulted in a lawsuit against Apple. He’s heard that this patent dispute is the largest lawsuit in patent history. He describes how these patents revolve around the implementation and user interface design of Cover Flow, Spotlight, and Time Machine. I don’t know anything about these patent issues but it will be interesting to see if Facebook will soon become a target of them as well.
He goes on to state this
Without commenting on the legal aspects, which I’m not capable of doing, those are lifestreams and there are other companies that have done similar things. That makes me angry personally, not because of the money, but because of the deliberate failure to acknowledge work that we would have made freely available as academics and that companies will not acknowledge because there is so much money involved.
This really is a shame. David goes on to talk about how he’s excited about how the Lifestreaming concept has proliferated across personal sites and commercial services and specifically mentions FriendFeed, AOL, and Bebo. I was also humbled by the fact that I think this blog got a shout out in the interview which is great.
He closes the question by returning to the patent issue and states this
It’s not as if we want to stop that activity – shut it down, but we’d like to see credit where credit is due. Not just to me, or mainly to me, but to graduates who’ve actually built the software, worked tremendously hard, published the papers, put them in – you know, made them available, and we’d like to see credit awarded.
You can view a video of the interview on the Big Think site. Note: the Lifestreaming question comes in at 3:45 of the video. There’s also a full transcript of the interview available as well.
October 04 2011
Facebook Built the Timeline, but Will They Come?
I followed this Poll on Mashable that asked if people planned to go back to fill in the gaps of their Facebook timeline. There were 3,101 votes at the time of this posting with ~11% stating they will and ~60% saying they won’t. I find that 11% to be a pretty small number and surely not one that would make Facebook happy about the rollout. Sure it’s a relatively small sample size, and Mashable users may not equate to a mainstream Facebook user, but I think this number will be pretty close to reality. You can also argue that polling whether users will go back to update versus whether they will configure their timeline moving forward are two separate questions, I believe the answer will be about the same.
I stated in my previous post that:
I think the majority of users on Facebook will not like this transition as they mainly use the service to communicate and share information with their friends in a simple clean interface and timeline will now become an obstacle to that.
I also felt the timeline should have been a supplemental view instead of a profile replacement and if only 11% of users embrace it, then it will most likely fail miserably. It’s a distinct departure from both the current utility and UI of the service. I went through my timeline and there are huge gaps and the primary reason for that is that I don’t use Facebook as the hub of my Lifestream. Most of my content was posted on other services. Most of photos were posted on Flickr, my status updates on Twitter, my videos on YouTube…etc. Unless you’ve been using Facebook as the central repository for all of your social sharing, or plan to do so moving forward, then it doesn’t quite make sense to be your Lifestream’s home base.
This blog was created because I was researching tools that gave me the freedom to aggregate the content I created to create a Lifestream across various different services I wanted to use. I think many people enjoy that freedom and don’t want to be confined to the limitations of a single service and its limitations to do this. Facebook does appear to have built in the hooks to offer us the ability to cobble together a few custom apps that we will be able to place on our timelines (such as the spotify app) to provide a way for 3rd party services to power our Lifestream on Facebook. However I’ve also stated in the past that mainstream users won’t go down this path and Facebook could presumably become a Lifestream for them. With the rollout of timelines we shall soon see what mainstream users think of it and whether it will resonate with them.
September 25 2011
Facebook Ushers in Lifestreaming for the Masses
If you had been watching me as I watched Mark Zuckerberg present the new Facebook Timeline you would have seen a smirk on face. It was also interesting to see how many other people picked up on how Timeline was Facebook’s migration from Newsfeed to Lifestream. I’ve been writing about Lifestreaming here since 2007. As I first discovered the concept that started as a php hack to aggregate multiple RSS feeds to the launch of countless startups all taking very different approaches, I truly felt it would evolve into something big that would eventually make it’s way to the mainstream. Facebook will soon unleash Timeline which takes its cue from many of the Lifestreaming services that preceded it over the last few years.
The “timeline” approach to Lifestreaming, and there have been many different approaches, became pretty popular with several services over the last few years. Recently, Memolane has emerged as one of the more popular ones and very recently I reviewed Glossi which is very nice as well. I liked the timeline approaches but wanted a little more and wrote about wanting a calendar based UI for Lifestreaming in 2009. It’s pretty funny that my mockup for that post used FriendFeed as an example which eventually got bought by Facebook and made co-founder Brett Taylor their CTO, but I digress.
Timeline brings Lifestreaming to Facebook (click image to visit my page)
So what are my thoughts on Facebook’s Timeline? Well I think they’ve done a great job building it to visualize our posts and milestones over the years. It also seems that there will be apps that will allow us to segregate sections of it to focus on specific actions such as music, books and movies. I’m a fan of the segregated content approach and Flavors.me is my favorite site in this area. All of that said, I feel that they should have provided timeline as a supplemental view to our existing profiles and not a replacement. The simplicity and consistent experience of viewing the newsfeed when you visit a users profile will soon be gone. Status updates will now begin much further down on profiles pretty much “below the fold”. As we see more custom apps to publish content as boxes in the timeline, you will see a very diverse experience when travelling from profile to profile. I think the majority of users on Facebook will not like this transition as they mainly use the service to communicate and share information with their friends in a simple clean interface and timeline will now become an obstacle to that.
Two other announcements that will have huge implications are the Open Graph and Ticker initiatives. Open Graph will take “Liking” things to a whole new level with the introduction of additional actions that will now appear potentially both on your newsfeed as well as the newly introduced real-time Ticker. So you will be able to share new actions such as “read” a “book”, or “watched” a “movie”. I feel this is a great expansion on the limited nature and context of what “liking” something offered which I wrote about last year in my post on the evolution of likes as social gestures which hinted at the future we are about to see come to fruition.
An interesting aspect of this is that up until now you’ve explicitly shared information by clicking on the like, share, or recommend buttons on Facebook or other websites. Louis Gray wrote a post describing the value of user behavior in regards to explicitly sharing selective content on social networks. His post questions whether the noise and minutiae of implicit sharing is of any value. As an example users may currently use a service like Getglue or Miso to selectively share tv shows or movies they watch. But in that example you choose what viewing you want to share. Now developers will be modifying or releasing new apps that can take your actions that are occurring natively within a service and automatically share them on Facebook. So for example a modified Facebook app by Netflix they will add the ability to automatically post everything you watch on the service on Facebook.
I have some mixed feelings about how implicit gestures may get integrated into Facebook. I think it depends on several factors including:
- Can people get value from it?
- Can they control it?
- Can the resulting content be hidden easily?
Let me answer these points…
real-time posting of songs I listen to on Last.fm
I’m fine with automatically sharing all the music I listen to in real-time because I’ve been doing this already for years scrobbling to Last.fm. For my following example implicit sharing means giving an app or service authorization to continually post an open graph verb / noun combination passively in the background for you while you’re using it. In the case of a music service this becomes “listened” to “song”. The value I’ve gotten from this implicit action is being able to discover new music from my friends that have also been doing it. Facebook is taking scrobbling to a whole new level by aggregating users real-time listening across multiple streaming music services including Spotify, Rdio, Mog, and others directly to the Facebook ticker. The Facebook ticker has been added to the chat sidebar and can easily be hidden away. So in this scenario I think implicit sharing and the method Facebook has implemented it is a good thing on the service.
I do however think that Facebook will run into problems with how developers implement implicit sharing on Facebook using the open graph. My example above is one that I think many people will enjoy and has very few implications from a privacy standpoint other than exposing your crappy music taste to friends. There will be other instances where this will not be the case. My guess is that the process for authorization of apps that leverage the open graph will be in the form of an additional item on the standard Facebook permissions dialog box which people will glance over in the same way they currently check TOS boxes without reading them. Most people won’t realize that they’ve authorized the implicit sharing to the ticker from apps they grant permission to and we will no doubt hear some horror stories from this in the future.
Chris Saad wrote an analysis of Timeline, Ticker and Open Graph. It generated an interesting conversation over on Google+ that I participated in. His post poses several interesting questions including whether other services will implement similar strategies, whether independent websites will also try to gather their users data in the same ways Facebook now will. He also mentions that Facebook has essentially re-launched the much lauded Beacon product with the release of these features. While Beacon was squarely aimed at creating and leveraging user data for targeted ads, these new features weren’t described to resurrect that…yet. I did however go read up on Beacon a bit to refresh my memory and found this interesting blog post from Zuckerberg apologizing for the Beacon missteps and in it he stated “People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, [and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don't want to use it.]” I have a feeling that with the open graph’s method of implementation Mark will be challenged on this point once again.
Facebook Ushers in Lifestreaming for the Masses
If you had been watching me as I watched Mark Zuckerberg present the new Facebook Timeline you would have seen a smirk on face. It was also interesting to see how many other people picked up on how Timeline was Facebook’s migration from Newsfeed to Lifestream. I’ve been writing about Lifestreaming here since 2007. As I first discovered the concept that started as a php hack to aggregate multiple RSS feeds to the launch of countless startups all taking very different approaches, I truly felt it would evolve into something big that would eventually make it’s way to the mainstream. Facebook will soon unleash Timeline which takes its cue from many of the Lifestreaming services that preceded it over the last few years.
The “timeline” approach to Lifestreaming, and there have been many different approaches, became pretty popular with several services over the last few years. Recently, Memolane has emerged as one of the more popular ones and very recently I reviewed Glossi which is very nice as well. I liked the timeline approaches but wanted a little more and wrote about wanting a calendar based UI for Lifestreaming in 2009. It’s pretty funny that my mockup for that post used FriendFeed as an example which eventually got bought by Facebook and made co-founder Brett Taylor their CTO, but I digress.
Timeline brings Lifestreaming to Facebook (click image to visit my page)
So what are my thoughts on Facebook’s Timeline? Well I think they’ve done a great job building it to visualize our posts and milestones over the years. It also seems that there will be apps that will allow us to segregate sections of it to focus on specific actions such as music, books and movies. I’m a fan of the segregated content approach and Flavors.me is my favorite site in this area. All of that said, I feel that they should have provided timeline as a supplemental view to our existing profiles and not a replacement. The simplicity and consistent experience of viewing the newsfeed when you visit a users profile will soon be gone. Status updates will now begin much further down on profiles pretty much “below the fold”. As we see more custom apps to publish content as boxes in the timeline, you will see a very diverse experience when travelling from profile to profile. I think the majority of users on Facebook will not like this transition as they mainly use the service to communicate and share information with their friends in a simple clean interface and timeline will now become an obstacle to that.
Two other announcements that will have huge implications are the Open Graph and Ticker initiatives. Open Graph will take “Liking” things to a whole new level with the introduction of additional actions that will now appear potentially both on your newsfeed as well as the newly introduced real-time Ticker. So you will be able to share new actions such as “read” a “book”, or “watched” a “movie”. I feel this is a great expansion on the limited nature and context of what “liking” something offered which I wrote about last year in my post on the evolution of likes as social gestures which hinted at the future we are about to see come to fruition.
An interesting aspect of this is that up until now you’ve explicitly shared information by clicking on the like, share, or recommend buttons on Facebook or other websites. Louis Gray wrote a post describing the value of user behavior in regards to explicitly sharing selective content on social networks. His post questions whether the noise and minutiae of implicit sharing is of any value. As an example users may currently use a service like Getglue or Miso to selectively share tv shows or movies they watch. But in that example you choose what viewing you want to share. Now developers will be modifying or releasing new apps that can take your actions that are occurring natively within a service and automatically share them on Facebook. So for example a modified Facebook app by Netflix they will add the ability to automatically post everything you watch on the service on Facebook.
I have some mixed feelings about how implicit gestures may get integrated into Facebook. I think it depends on several factors including:
- Can people get value from it?
- Can they control it?
- Can the resulting content be hidden easily?
Let me answer these points…
real-time posting of songs I listen to on Last.fm
I’m fine with automatically sharing all the music I listen to in real-time because I’ve been doing this already for years scrobbling to Last.fm. For my following example implicit sharing means giving an app or service authorization to continually post an open graph verb / noun combination passively in the background for you while you’re using it. In the case of a music service this becomes “listened” to “song”. The value I’ve gotten from this implicit action is being able to discover new music from my friends that have also been doing it. Facebook is taking scrobbling to a whole new level by aggregating users real-time listening across multiple streaming music services including Spotify, Rdio, Mog, and others directly to the Facebook ticker. The Facebook ticker has been added to the chat sidebar and can easily be hidden away. So in this scenario I think implicit sharing and the method Facebook has implemented it is a good thing on the service.
I do however think that Facebook will run into problems with how developers implement implicit sharing on Facebook using the open graph. My example above is one that I think many people will enjoy and has very few implications from a privacy standpoint other than exposing your crappy music taste to friends. There will be other instances where this will not be the case. My guess is that the process for authorization of apps that leverage the open graph will be in the form of an additional item on the standard Facebook permissions dialog box which people will glance over in the same way they currently check TOS boxes without reading them. Most people won’t realize that they’ve authorized the implicit sharing to the ticker from apps they grant permission to and we will no doubt hear some horror stories from this in the future.
Chris Saad wrote an analysis of Timeline, Ticker and Open Graph. It generated an interesting conversation over on Google+ that I participated in. His post poses several interesting questions including whether other services will implement similar strategies, whether independent websites will also try to gather their users data in the same ways Facebook now will. He also mentions that Facebook has essentially re-launched the much lauded Beacon product with the release of these features. While Beacon was squarely aimed at creating and leveraging user data for targeted ads, these new features weren’t described to resurrect that…yet. I did however go read up on Beacon a bit to refresh my memory and found this interesting blog post from Zuckerberg apologizing for the Beacon missteps and in it he stated “People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, [and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don't want to use it.]” I have a feeling that with the open graph’s method of implementation Mark will be challenged on this point once again.
September 10 2011
Glossi Takes a Fresh New Approach to Lifestreaming
As I mentioned in my 2010 year end post the Lifestreaming services area has pretty much vanquished from the heydays back in 2007 & 2008 when I first created this blog. It seemed like a new service popped up every other week back then. But ultimately I believe several factors that included the inability to monetize them and the lack of mainstream acceptance ultimately doomed this exciting service niche.
The last service I covered was Memolane which went live late last year. They took a timeline based approach to Lifestreaming and provide the ability to import very deep archived data from the services they support. They also allow the Lifestreams to be embedded on other sites. These were a few of the distinctive features that brought a taste of how new services may be able to provide a resurgence to the Lifestreaming services arena. With all of the new innovations with regards to Visualizing and accessing data via API on the web not to mention the emergence of HTML5 there are many new tricks that can start to become apparent to liven up this old dog (in web years of course) called Lifestreaming.
And then along comes Glossi which is the first Lifestreaming service I have written about this year. I discovered Glossi from this post on The Next Web where Nancy Messieh not only provides a glimpse of this currently in private beta service, but also gains access to the inspiration and future plans from the founders. Luckily they were offering invites so I quickly snapped one up so I could take this new service for a spin. [Spolier alert: I have invites for readers below]
In the past, the the majority of Lifestreaming services took a pretty dry visual approach by simply aggregating posts from all services in a bland list format. Glossi has taken a fresh new approach taking queues from newer visual designs and taking advantage of richer methods to display data.
Creating and setting up the account was super simple. Just plug in one or more of the current five services supported including Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook. I believe all services used a quick and simple oAuth process to connect your accounts. You also have the ability to set individual accounts to be either public or private, meaning that the content is only viewable by you. After you’ve connected all your accounts you can visit your profile page which depending on the services you’ve added will provide a nice visual display of your posts from each of the services.
The first thing to note with Glossi is that they break down your Lifestream into weekly chunks. So each page is comprised of all the posts within that week. For a profile that added Foursquare they will get a map with pushpins that represent all the checkins with a sidebar that offers a nice sliding list of the posts from each location along with a photo if one was added. Also, if you click on any of the pushpins it anchors directly to the post on the sliding bar. This is an example of using new thinking both from a presentation and functionality standpoint to add value to otherwise bland Lifestream data.
Below the Foursquare block you will get a random output of boxes that display tweets, photos, and posts from all of the other connected services in a visually appealing way. Also, each weekly page renders randomly upon every refresh. At the bottom of each weekly page are previous and next buttons to continue navigating through the timeline and if you mouseover a graph at the bottom you will get details of the number of tweets, checkins, posts, and photos as you slide through each week. The top of the page provides some basic profile information and avatar along with links to the external services you have linked up. Beyond that there is a button to visit other random Glossi profiles and there is a friending mechanism that acts as a way to bookmark other users profile pages.
So that’s Glossi in a nutshell. I like how they’ve taken the basic Lifestreaming data principal and have infused some newer ideas to make it more visually appealing. The Foursquare module is my favorite and I’d like to see some more innovative grouping of content done that way. In the interview Nancy did for The Next Web they mentioned that their top priority is to improve the visualization algorithm and then they will focus on adding new services including RSS, Posterous, Flickr, Gowalla, Vimeo, Last.fm. I hope they add YouTube as well.
I’m happy to see that although Lifestreaming services have languished, that there are still people that see the value and continue to try and provide new approaches to creating services around them. I look forward to watching Glossi progress with their development roadmap.
Glossi was nice enough to provide 100 invite codes to their private beta for Lifestream Blog readers. Just visit this link and go test out their service.
Glossi Takes a Fresh New Approach to Lifestreaming
As I mentioned in my 2010 year end post the Lifestreaming services area has pretty much vanquished from the heydays back in 2007 & 2008 when I first created this blog. It seemed like a new service popped up every other week back then. But ultimately I believe several factors that included the inability to monetize them and the lack of mainstream acceptance ultimately doomed this exciting service niche.
The last service I covered was Memolane which went live late last year. They took a timeline based approach to Lifestreaming and provide the ability to import very deep archived data from the services they support. They also allow the Lifestreams to be embedded on other sites. These were a few of the distinctive features that brought a taste of how new services may be able to provide a resurgence to the Lifestreaming services arena. With all of the new innovations with regards to Visualizing and accessing data via API on the web not to mention the emergence of HTML5 there are many new tricks that can start to become apparent to liven up this old dog (in web years of course) called Lifestreaming.
And then along comes Glossi which is the first Lifestreaming service I have written about this year. I discovered Glossi from this post on The Next Web where Nancy Messieh not only provides a glimpse of this currently in private beta service, but also gains access to the inspiration and future plans from the founders. Luckily they were offering invites so I quickly snapped one up so I could take this new service for a spin. [Spolier alert: I have invites for readers below]
In the past, the the majority of Lifestreaming services took a pretty dry visual approach by simply aggregating posts from all services in a bland list format. Glossi has taken a fresh new approach taking queues from newer visual designs and taking advantage of richer methods to display data.
Creating and setting up the account was super simple. Just plug in one or more of the current five services supported including Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook. I believe all services used a quick and simple oAuth process to connect your accounts. You also have the ability to set individual accounts to be either public or private, meaning that the content is only viewable by you. After you’ve connected all your accounts you can visit your profile page which depending on the services you’ve added will provide a nice visual display of your posts from each of the services.
The first thing to note with Glossi is that they break down your Lifestream into weekly chunks. So each page is comprised of all the posts within that week. For a profile that added Foursquare they will get a map with pushpins that represent all the checkins with a sidebar that offers a nice sliding list of the posts from each location along with a photo if one was added. Also, if you click on any of the pushpins it anchors directly to the post on the sliding bar. This is an example of using new thinking both from a presentation and functionality standpoint to add value to otherwise bland Lifestream data.
Below the Foursquare block you will get a random output of boxes that display tweets, photos, and posts from all of the other connected services in a visually appealing way. Also, each weekly page renders randomly upon every refresh. At the bottom of each weekly page are previous and next buttons to continue navigating through the timeline and if you mouseover a graph at the bottom you will get details of the number of tweets, checkins, posts, and photos as you slide through each week. The top of the page provides some basic profile information and avatar along with links to the external services you have linked up. Beyond that there is a button to visit other random Glossi profiles and there is a friending mechanism that acts as a way to bookmark other users profile pages.
So that’s Glossi in a nutshell. I like how they’ve taken the basic Lifestreaming data principal and have infused some newer ideas to make it more visually appealing. The Foursquare module is my favorite and I’d like to see some more innovative grouping of content done that way. In the interview Nancy did for The Next Web they mentioned that their top priority is to improve the visualization algorithm and then they will focus on adding new services including RSS, Posterous, Flickr, Gowalla, Vimeo, Last.fm. I hope they add YouTube as well.
I’m happy to see that although Lifestreaming services have languished, that there are still people that see the value and continue to try and provide new approaches to creating services around them. I look forward to watching Glossi progress with their development roadmap.
Glossi was nice enough to provide 100 invite codes to their private beta for Lifestream Blog readers. Just visit this link and go test out their service.
August 25 2011
Create a Dynamic Activity Stream with the Jquery Lifestream Script
I came across this great script that allows you to add a dynamic Lifestream to your existing website. When I say dynamic I mean it queries the stream for all the services you add to it and displays them on the page but does not archive them to a database. You can define how many items you want displayed in the script. Implementation is a little more difficult than just enabling a plugin or module but doesn’t require programming skills. The only requirements are that you’re running Jquery 1.4.2 or higher. If you’re running WordPress you should have this if your running the latest version. You will however need to create your own custom page and template to implement Jquery Lifestream.
Jquery Lifestream Example Build Page
There are some pretty good implementation code examples as well as other instructions here. Another feature of this script is that it can be styled using CSS. There is also a demo page where you can create your own Lifestream and take the script for a test drive here.
The script currently supports the following feeds natively:
Bitbucket, Bitly, Blogger, Dailymotion, Delicious, DeviantART, Dribbble, Flickr, Foomark, Formspring, Forrst, Foursquare, Github, Google Reader, Instapaper, Iusethis, Last.fm, Mlkshk, PicPlz, Pinboard,Posterous, Reddit, Slideshare, Snipplr
Stackoverflow, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, and Youtube.
The code updates have been pretty active and many of them continue to add new services. So if you’re a little adventurous and don’t care about archiving stream items in your local database and want the easy flexibility to style your Lifestream with some custom CSS I recommend giving this code a shot. If you’re running WordPress and want to try something a little easier get the WP Lifestream plugin. I also have a list of many other scripts and options here.
Create a Dynamic Activity Stream with the Jquery Lifestream Script
I came across this great script that allows you to add a dynamic Lifestream to your existing website. When I say dynamic I mean it queries the stream for all the services you add to it and displays them on the page but does not archive them to a database. You can define how many items you want displayed in the script. Implementation is a little more difficult than just enabling a plugin or module but doesn’t require programming skills. The only requirements are that you’re running Jquery 1.4.2 or higher. If you’re running WordPress you should have this if your running the latest version. You will however need to create your own custom page and template to implement Jquery Lifestream.
Jquery Lifestream Example Build Page
There are some pretty good implementation code examples as well as other instructions here. Another feature of this script is that it can be styled using CSS. There is also a demo page where you can create your own Lifestream and take the script for a test drive here.
The script currently supports the following feeds natively:
Bitbucket, Bitly, Blogger, Dailymotion, Delicious, DeviantART, Dribbble, Flickr, Foomark, Formspring, Forrst, Foursquare, Github, Google Reader, Instapaper, Iusethis, Last.fm, Mlkshk, PicPlz, Pinboard,Posterous, Reddit, Slideshare, Snipplr
Stackoverflow, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, and Youtube.
The code updates have been pretty active and many of them continue to add new services. So if you’re a little adventurous and don’t care about archiving stream items in your local database and want the easy flexibility to style your Lifestream with some custom CSS I recommend giving this code a shot. If you’re running WordPress and want to try something a little easier get the WP Lifestream plugin. I also have a list of many other scripts and options here.
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Facebook Built the Timeline, but Will They Come?
I stated in my previous post that:
I also felt the timeline should have been a supplemental view instead of a profile replacement and if only 11% of users embrace it, then it will most likely fail miserably. It’s a distinct departure from both the current utility and UI of the service. I went through my timeline and there are huge gaps and the primary reason for that is that I don’t use Facebook as the hub of my Lifestream. Most of my content was posted on other services. Most of photos were posted on Flickr, my status updates on Twitter, my videos on YouTube…etc. Unless you’ve been using Facebook as the central repository for all of your social sharing, or plan to do so moving forward, then it doesn’t quite make sense to be your Lifestream’s home base.
This blog was created because I was researching tools that gave me the freedom to aggregate the content I created to create a Lifestream across various different services I wanted to use. I think many people enjoy that freedom and don’t want to be confined to the limitations of a single service and its limitations to do this. Facebook does appear to have built in the hooks to offer us the ability to cobble together a few custom apps that we will be able to place on our timelines (such as the spotify app) to provide a way for 3rd party services to power our Lifestream on Facebook. However I’ve also stated in the past that mainstream users won’t go down this path and Facebook could presumably become a Lifestream for them. With the rollout of timelines we shall soon see what mainstream users think of it and whether it will resonate with them.