Are You Ready for Life Streaming?
August 19, 2008 · Print This Article
In our GodblogCon.com conversation with Andrew Jones (Tall Skinny Kiwi) last week, we talked about life streaming.
That got me thinking during my web 2.0 time today. First, I logged into Facebook to think about that as a location where someone might start life streaming.
Facebook Has Applications to Bring Your Feeds into One Place
Certainly, Facebook’s applications allow other activities to be distributed to your friends. For instance, I link my Twitter updates to my Facebook status with the Facebook Twitter application. And I’ve used a variety of applications to share my blog feed through facebook. After experimenting with several things like Facebook’s Mirror Blog, I finally settled on Facebook’s friendfeed application.
Which requires a friendfeed account, of course.
When Life Streaming Gets Redundant
Still with me? Here’s where things start to get weird. friendfeed aggregates feeds similar to Facebook. I can bring my blog, my flickr, my Twitter, even my NetFlix queue, all into friendfeed. Then shoot it back out in one RSS “life stream” to Facebook and similar services.
Forget the anonymous second and third life stuff of the late 1990s. Life streaming is online transparency that helps us hold each other accountable.
But the technology is still clunky. For instance, Facebook Twitter and friendfeed don’t play well together. Twitter shoots directly to my Facebook status. Then, friendfeed routes the same Twitter post to my Facebook stream. So my friends were getting double notifications.
Mark Goodyear tweets via Twitter and Facebook. Followed by identical Mark Goodyear tweets via Twitter and friendfeed and Facebook. Just look:
I still have the problem with redundant blog postings on Facebook.
And now I’ve got the problem of redundant social book circle sites. Oh, the woes of web 2.0. Do I stick with Shelfari? Do I switch to Goodreads (which has the PERFECT name)? Or Library Thing?
After the conversation with GodblogCon speaker Wade Tonkin, I’m also curious about experimenting with one of these as if I’m an affiliate marketer.
Who knows. Who knows. Is anyone else trying this kind of stuff?
Before you answer that, here’s a cool widget from Goodreads:
Two Men Fighting with a Knife by John Poch
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Not many poets these days are committed to forms like John Poch. He’s the editor of 32 Poems Magazine and a professor of poetry at Texas Tech. And he understands sonnets. This collection of sonnets, sestinas, and other forms often has a wonderful southwestern flavor. Poch isn’t limited to that, though. His sonnet crown written in thanks to a neurosurgeon, for instance, transcends any brand of American regionalism in a way that is joyful, playful, and spiritual.
OK, the goodreads widget layout isn’t the prettiest, but still. It’s fun to be able to post little reviews like that.
Here’s the real question. What would it look like if a few High Calling Bloggers started life streaming, sharing their life stream, and raising their hands to be an example of Christian living online?
We authors like that little widget at the end. : )
Personally, I found the whole Facebook and Twitter thing to be kind of exhausting. Keeping some of my life to myself, rather than letting it stream, turned out to be critical for my personal well-being.
So. If somebody wants to wiggle their toes in the water, they may just have to pick up the phone. And I like that far better. (What can I say… I’m one of those people who still hasn’t gotten a cell phone. : )
Mark,
I think it would be cool if there was some way to leave a trail of sites you visited and brief comment on why.
I invariably start my web time with a devotion at Crosswalk.com then walk around my bloghood - a series of blogs I check regularly. It’s too easy and no fun to put them all in my reader.
-Sam
Sam, the closest thing I think I’ve seen to that is Net Vibes. I need to look into it more, though.
Also, friendfeed, allows you to aggregate activities. So my del.icio.us links go there, my flickr images, my twitter posts used to, my blog headlines.
I used to use cocomment to aggregate my comments across the web, but that never quite worked out for me. And one Firefox update finally broke my system. I might try it again.
Is there a “Grand Central Station” for all this life streaming. Write a post, then click from a list of apps you want it to post to…Or does that already exist, and I’m too techno-disabled to figure it out?
Christa, the closest thing I’ve seen to what you’re talking about is the Flock browser. It takes a lot of memory to run, but it really makes it easy to jump between services.
The other thing that might work is Netvibes. But I think that requires a bit of set up.