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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.
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.
January 17 2011
Memolane Brings Beautiful Visuals and UI Along with a Deep Historical Lifestream
Memolane is a new timeline based Lifestreaming service. I have played with several of these niche based services with the likes of Dipity, Allofme, ThisMoment, and another newcomer Dather. Creating a visual timeline of your Lifestream may seem like a pretty straightforward process but it’s actually pretty challenging. Some data lends itself well while other items may not. How a service provides the ability to navigate the timeline can be done many ways. Creating a UI to do this well is no easy task.
Enter Memolane, a service that seems to have put a good amount of time and effort into creating a flowing method for navigating a Lifestream on a timeline. They manage to keep a simple simple but rich view of the timeline while also allowing quick and easy navigation to data from several years back. Each source data item is presented in a visual way. Each piece of data that is added is considered a “memo”. The memo’s appear as individual items daily like a leaves on a vine. Photos, RSS feeds, and image supported tweets display thumbnails, Check-ins display pushpins for complete daily activity on mini-maps. They also have smart aggregation for similar items. For instance multiple last.fm listens are rolled up into a single entry that can be expanded to display multiple items. Another feature of the Last.fm data stream is the ability to link songs to either an Amazon.com product page or your Spotify client should you be so lucky to have access. YouTube videos will play embedded within the site and Flickr galleries can be navigated within their respective memo’s as well.
My page at Memolane
Besides the method by which these timeline services display their data, another distinguishing factor is which services are supported. Memolane has good support with their lineup which includes Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Last.fm, Foursquare, Tripit, YouTube, and RSS feeds. Timelines are much better when based on a large body of historical data. Memolane does a pretty nice job here with the interface making it easy navigate to individual dates from several years back. The amount of historical memo’s will boil down to how far back each service provides data. In my case I have Flickr photos imported that dated back to 2003, last.fm activity from 2005, but my Twitter data doesn’t appear to have been imported from my early usage.
Besides just offering the data imports that are displayed chronologically, Memolane also has a feature called “stories”. This allows you to manually select memo’s that you hand pick from your timeline to craft your own story. So you could collect items such as tweets, check-in’s, photos, and videos for a vacation as an example. These stories can also be collaborations where you can invite other Memolane friends to add their memo’s. Speaking of friends, you can add them on the service so that you can easily find and navigate their timelines on the service as well.
On January 11th they released added privacy features which include adding more granular privacy settings which can now be set on individual services as opposed to all or nothing on your full timeline. Also, within the service there are also settings to have the full timeline private, only shared with other Memolane friends, or completely public. These privacy features can be set for the “stories” feature as well.
Here’s a video recorded by the Memolane team showing their functionality
Memolane has gotten some attention as it was started by the original founders of Skype. The service is currently in private beta and I’ve been testing it since late last year. While they still need to iron out some kinks it’s a nice service. It has already been covered well by TheNextWeb as well as ReadWriteWeb. If you enjoy going back to old photo albums or journals then you will really enjoy this digital equivalent where you can just easily slide your mouse and revisit digital memories from years gone by.
The folks at Memolane have been nice enough to offer 200 invite codes to the readers of Lifestream Blog. Just visit this link and enter the invite code “lifestream“.
If you’d like to learn more about the team behind Memolane you can watch this video interview by Robert Scoble
Memolane Brings Beautiful Visuals and UI Along with a Deep Historical Lifestream
Memolane is a new timeline based Lifestreaming service. I have played with several of these niche based services with the likes of Dipity, Allofme, ThisMoment, and another newcomer Dather. Creating a visual timeline of your Lifestream may seem like a pretty straightforward process but it’s actually pretty challenging. Some data lends itself well while other items may not. How a service provides the ability to navigate the timeline can be done many ways. Creating a UI to do this well is no easy task.
Enter Memolane, a service that seems to have put a good amount of time and effort into creating a flowing method for navigating a Lifestream on a timeline. They manage to keep a simple simple but rich view of the timeline while also allowing quick and easy navigation to data from several years back. Each source data item is presented in a visual way. Each piece of data that is added is considered a “memo”. The memo’s appear as individual items daily like a leaves on a vine. Photos, RSS feeds, and image supported tweets display thumbnails, Check-ins display pushpins for complete daily activity on mini-maps. They also have smart aggregation for similar items. For instance multiple last.fm listens are rolled up into a single entry that can be expanded to display multiple items. Another feature of the Last.fm data stream is the ability to link songs to either an Amazon.com product page or your Spotify client should you be so lucky to have access. YouTube videos will play embedded within the site and Flickr galleries can be navigated within their respective memo’s as well.
My page at Memolane
Besides the method by which these timeline services display their data, another distinguishing factor is which services are supported. Memolane has good support with their lineup which includes Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Last.fm, Foursquare, Tripit, YouTube, and RSS feeds. Timelines are much better when based on a large body of historical data. Memolane does a pretty nice job here with the interface making it easy navigate to individual dates from several years back. The amount of historical memo’s will boil down to how far back each service provides data. In my case I have Flickr photos imported that dated back to 2003, last.fm activity from 2005, but my Twitter data doesn’t appear to have been imported from my early usage.
Besides just offering the data imports that are displayed chronologically, Memolane also has a feature called “stories”. This allows you to manually select memo’s that you hand pick from your timeline to craft your own story. So you could collect items such as tweets, check-in’s, photos, and videos for a vacation as an example. These stories can also be collaborations where you can invite other Memolane friends to add their memo’s. Speaking of friends, you can add them on the service so that you can easily find and navigate their timelines on the service as well.
On January 11th they released added privacy features which include adding more granular privacy settings which can now be set on individual services as opposed to all or nothing on your full timeline. Also, within the service there are also settings to have the full timeline private, only shared with other Memolane friends, or completely public. These privacy features can be set for the “stories” feature as well.
Here’s a video recorded by the Memolane team showing their functionality
Memolane has gotten some attention as it was started by the original founders of Skype. The service is currently in private beta and I’ve been testing it since late last year. While they still need to iron out some kinks it’s a nice service. It has already been covered well by TheNextWeb as well as ReadWriteWeb. If you enjoy going back to old photo albums or journals then you will really enjoy this digital equivalent where you can just easily slide your mouse and revisit digital memories from years gone by.
The folks at Memolane have been nice enough to offer 200 invite codes to the readers of Lifestream Blog. Just visit this link and enter the invite code “lifestream“.
If you’d like to learn more about the team behind Memolane you can watch this video interview by Robert Scoble
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
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.