Identity Through Online Lifestreams

Over the last few months I have really changed how and where I create content. For a long time all of the action was here, on my blog. Today I am posting to Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter and Facebook. I also have tons of other less active accounts too - digg, Blogger, MySpace, YouTube, MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, Jaiku, Pownce and on and on.

Where I will publish in a year's time is anyone's guess. However, what you can bank on is that I will have even more community accounts than I do now.

The problem here is that this has created dozens of online identities for me, a single individual. People who want to follow me need to pick their poison - this blog, Twitter, etc. I use each medium differently but what I hate about it is that I need to think about the information I want to publish and the venue that's best for both me and my audience.

I finally have honed in on what I think is a viable solution. Enter Tumblr. This simple, free service allows anyone to create a tumblelog - which is basically a bare bones blog. Gina Trapani recently explained how to set one up.

Tumblr is unique in that it can ingest any RSS feeds that you throw at it and aggregate all by date - what Dave Winer so eloquently calls a river of news. And since RSS is the common denominator that unites most communities, the end result is an online Lifestream - a place for all of your stuff. (Josh Bancroft was the first to come up with the idea.)

I have set up a tumblelog at my personal domain at www.steverubel.com. It rolls up my blog, del.icio.us links, Flickr, Facebook notes and Twitter tweets all in one place. You can subscribe to the feed here. Also, there's a mobile version. Next step: turning my lifestream into a Steve Rubel widget.

I really like that there is a single place attached to my name that rolls up all of the content that I am publishing online. I also like that in just a couple of clicks I can set up a river of news that I can share at the domain of my choosing. This can become a very powerful concept. For example, I could use either my existing tumblelog or a new one at a sub domain to roll up all of your content - such as @steverubel tweets on Twitter or in-bound inks to my various blogs.

Aggregated Lifestreams could be the next big thing on the web, particularly as community expands. I am also thinking about how this might be coupled with services like social networks, Twittergram, Spock and OpenID. What do you think of this idea?

Comments

[Dario Salvelli]

A very interesting idea in order to aggregate all in one place: i have a Tumblelog and i know that Tumblr is often down... :(

[Sam Harrelson]

Great post, Steve. I've been using Tumblr for the last few months for this purpose (http://samharrelson.net/) and love it. I visit a few times a week just to see what I've been twittering or what my Facebook status' have been in the past, etc.

A few of my family members use it to keep track of me as well (mostly for the Flickr pics), so it's a nice conversation piece when we see each other in person.

[Paul Jacobson]

I started using a tumblelog a little while ago in a similar way and it is a great tool. I also use Jaiku as my overall lifestream tool (I don't feed everything into my tumblelog).

[Mike]

I love it. I'm not nearly as prolific a "prosumer" as you, but I might give this a whirl. Could be cool.

[Wolfgang]

d'accord - but tumblr is not _that_ unique. I use a european service (jaiku) for that since some months I think and also pointed my old "homepage" adress to this - at http://luebue.jaiku.com

Call it online identity :-)

[Chris Webb]

Exactly right Steve - I had the same experience several months back and rolled mine all into tumblr as well (chriswebb.tumblr.com)

I had my tumblr stream imported into my Notes on my Facebook profile, but soon got an abuse warning from the Facebook team. It seems the Notes feature has an unknown limit on the frequency of updates, and if I updated Twitter several times in the span of a half hour or so, it was flagged.

So, I had to use the Facebook Twitter app to import Tweets, and just fed my blog into Facebook Notes, which captures my posts as well as a daily del.icio.us update.

As a matter of course I simply add any new service's RSS feed into tumblr to create my master feed.

[Steve Jay]

Steve,

It's definitely the way forward. I created my lifestream through Jaiku, and it can be found at http://www.stevejay.com

I've blogged about how I did it here...
http://corporatezorro.typepad.com/thedigitalmarketingblog/presence_stream/index.html

[Cedric]

Hi Steve,
interesting way to manage a lot of different streams... (you should post more photos on flickr to consider it as a "real" stream :)

BTW you could try webjam profile too : you decide what you want to display from your digital life. More flexible than any other social network...

Here is an example : http://www.chouingmedia.com/profile/ (well, I've to work on a fine design :)

[Mon]

Tumblr is dying soon, check their blog.

[Steve Rubel]

As others have suggested, Tumblr is not the only game in town here. The concept is what is powerful. The tool can change. Find the solution that works best for you.

[Nick]

I couldn't agree more. I've been using Tumblr for just this purpose for a while now and it works great.

[Daniele Muscetta]

I've used yahoo pipes to do the same "river" thing, aggregating my blog, my twitter, facebus status, flickr stream, etc. explained here: http://www.muscetta.com/2007/08/16/updated-rss-feed-for-this-blog/

[Diego]

Steve, try http://www.nonews.com. Let me know if you like it. We just opened it to the public and are looking feedback

[Ian Kennedy]

Elegant solution because it's so simple. If you're looking for a simple badge solution, try out Kent Brewster's Badger.

http://kentbrewster.com/badger/

[Trevor Ginn]

On sites like facebook you can already integrate feed from other services like a blog, stumbleupon etc. I suppose that this is a closed network though....

[kareem]

kottke talked about this several years ago. not a new concept, but the implementations are finally coming along...

[Adele McAlear]

What I'd really like to see in a lifestream app is the ability to update all of my content from a single interface. Someone out there must find a way to input profile changes once and have it update the relevant fields in the most popular social sites. Add some widgets for updating Twitter and Flickr, and maybe even a WordPress api. No more logging in to each site to update content, it could all be controlled from a single interface. That would be a beautiful thing. It's good to have dreams.

[Josh Bancroft]

Thanks for the mention, Steve, and great job on your life stream. I wasn't the first one to come up with the idea of Life Streaming, but I'm the first one I know to use tumbleog (generic meaning) to aggregate it all in to one place. I'm sure there's prior art, so I make no claim of ownership on the idea. But I love showing it to people and teaching them how to set up their own!

I've been loving having mine, and knowing that everything I do online gets collected AUTOMATICALLY at joshbancroft.com. That's the best feature, to me. The fact that it's all automated. Tip of the hat to Dave Winer and everyone who has worked on RSS, because that's what makes it all possible.

It's going to be interesting to see where this goes. I wonder if I'm too late to set up a site/domain name to make this all as easy an automatic as possible? I sense an opportunity there for someone to do something like that, either as a gift to the community, or with some kind of business model. (hint hint! - free idea for the taking!)

Josh

[Josh Bancroft]

Also, for those wanting to avoid lock in with Tumblr (on principle, or because they're not reliable enough), there's an open source web app called Gelato that does basically the same thing. I'm going to try it out, and see if it's a suitable piece of the puzzle for rolling your own lifestream, independent of any other company or service.

[Allen Fuller :: Flat Creek]

Josh, I imagine you have more than a few more customers tonight thanks to Steve's experiment with your product. Without his post this morning on Twitter, I would have never found your service - it's great!

Adele, we're on the same wavelength as I posted the exact same idea to Twitter earlier! To really turn things upside down, give us a Meebo-type application for our blogs, SoNets, photos, microblogs, etc. If someone like Josh could offer both the ability to view all our content from several platforms AND update that content on the same site - WOW. Talk about a serious disruptor.

[Allen Fuller :: Flat Creek]

Sorry, Josh - I misspoke earlier and assumed from your post that you were the force behind Tumblr itself rather than the force behind the larger concepts. Do look forward to following your work though.

[Colin McKay]

Steve:

Without seeming like too much of a curmudgeon, at what point do we have to question whether making all this personal information available in one place could actually pose a danger?

I've recently taken on a new job that prompts me to question the economic, emotional, and personal impact of all the information we let drift through the internet, and there CAN be consequences to being TOO open and forward.

[Dylan Damian]

If you end up switching to WordPress for your blog, you may even be interested in rolling your own hybrid blog/tumblelog, mixing regular articles with shorter lifestream entries. A few WordPress users recently posted how-tos on this topic. Links to the articles in a blurb on my own hybrid at http://www.thoughtstart.com/2007/08/another-wordpress-blog-goes-tumbling-hint-hint/.

While not really the automatic aggregator of feeds you describe, I find the process of posting tumblelog type entries quick and enjoyable. There's also a Quick Post-it WordPress plugin available. And I still retain the ability of posting a more elaborate piece when I feel like it.

[fred wilson]

i do the same thing Steve

http://fredwilson.vc/

tumblr is awesome

[dc crowley]

Hi Steve, I've been a big fan of unifeeds for quite a while. There are lots of ways to make unifeeds. Jaiku is really a unifeed. But I used feedblendr and combined all my feeds to make one new rss feed (I also have an parallel opml file online). With my feedblendr feed I did two things. I added a unifeed to my blog using autodiscovery which anyone can subscribe to (I use feedburner for that). I also have piped that feed through to twitter using the amazing twitterfeed. Point is, that I do not need to set up a new tumblr blog for the purpose, though in your case I would be very interested in your lifestream, just like I love Robert Scobles link blog.

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[Valeria Maltoni]

Fashionably late, I see. There were other, less elegant suggestions made about aggregation in my famous post on the proliferation of social networks http://www.conversationagent.com/2007/07/your-face-every.html

They say MT4 is better than WP -- I don't use either, so don't lynch me ;-) In my next new media interview I will talk about tumblelogs a little. Now if only we could have one, universal user ID and password life would be delicious (in the other, more traditional sense).

[Erkko]

This is a great idea and post, but is the need to create a lifestream just a ramification of us getting stuck using too many social platforms to do the things we could do in a more simple way?

We are clearly in the growth face of social platforms still, and when the real consolidation starts, i somehow feel that a lifestream is not needed, but the social platform you use is flexible enough to provide everything in one.

[Lars Teigen]

We're working on this for the upcoming release of Second Brain. We will connect to all the services you publish content to via APIs and then show your stream of internet content activities aggregated on your profile page. In the Second Brain community you will be able to follow your contacts' internet activities across the many services that they use.

We have a preview release now in closed beta, a public beta release is scheduled for the 1st. of October. Test Pilots get to see it first.

[Michae;]

Steve,

We thought you were a friend of dotMOBI.

Bank of America, Disney's High School Musical Series(commercial running their .mobi), ING, BMW and several other Fortune 1000 brands have adopted the dotMOBI extension thanks to the hard work from the talented team at Edelman....what about SteveRubel.mobi??

Respectfully,

Mike

[Steve Rubel]

Mike, absolutely. I have already registered steverubel.mobi and I am in the process of pointing it to the domain I linked to above.

[Randa Clay]

Thanks for this post Steve. I think the "lifestream" concept is a great one, and I think Tumblr is one of the best solutions to do it. I don't see that Tumblr is "dying" as one commenter mentioned, but rather as poised to become huge! I have a new site that is designed to keep track of free Tumblr themes and other tumblr news: http://tumblrthemes.com

[Joël de Bruijn]

Hi, Steve,

thanks for your post, really got me thinking.
Actually I want to agregate all my content to keep track of myself... like a diary, which is usefull to look back now and then.

Did the following:
- installed gelato cms, but couldn't fetch other rss...
- opened a profilactic account, which makes a great mashup, but the content is just your x nr of your latest activity...
- opened a feeddigest account, which did the same, although it looks uglier then profilactic.
- opened a tumblr account, but it didn't eat my feedburner feeds...
- looked for a wordpress plugin, and yes!!!

It's called WP-O-Matic. Can be found here http://devthought.com/wp-o-matic-the-wordpress-rss-agreggator/

It quickly imported everything (blog, delicious etc), although the date of the blogentries are the day of importing. It checks the feeds on a regular basis.

So my livestream is also a WordPress blog.

Thanks again for your posting.

[smorty71]

Hi Steve,
Profilactic will do a lot of the things you're looking to do. With Profilactic, you can:

1. Mash up all of the content you create on the web.
We support over 60 sites/social networks by default and you can add unlimited "custom" sites
2. Mash up all of your friends content the same way
3. Bookmark things about you from around the web
4. Take all of it with you with RSS feeds, JavaScript badges and e-mail digests.

You can see my Mashup here:
http://www.profilactic.com/mashup/smorty71

sm

[Thomas Ho]

While we're talking about lifestreaming, don't forget Mark Krynsky's blog http://lifestreamblog.com

I use http://claimID.com for my "online identity" that includes my ALTERNATIVE lifestreams (because they "break" so easily) at http://DrThomasHo.info

[Thomas Ho]

Another person who is especially interested in the monetization of lifestreams is Eduardas Afanasjevas at http://hyperpublic.com

[Brian Solis]

Hi Steve, nice work! You have definitely reignited the conversation in a way that helps it move this important topic along the bell curve.

Since 2006, there have been a lot of voices on this subject including Emily Chang, Stowe Boyd, Chris Saad, among many others. Their desire to aggregate all of their social activity into one stream was documented through a series of enlightening posts. It's interesting to go back and read them, as I believe they're still as relevant now.

Lifestreams, unifeeds, data streams, flow, data rivers, whatever it's called, there's more potential than simply channeling personal online activity through one feed or one platform.

Microblogs and other tools can also serve as a focused channel delivering the social content of not just people, but also organizations, businesses, as well as ideas, topics, and movements.

Here's a bit more on the history of lifestreaming as well as an exploration of some of its possibilities:
http://www.briansolis.com/2007/08/lifestreams-channel-online-activity.html

[John Tropea]

Hi Steve,

For a reference I have listed all the lifestream services in a blog post, as well as other RSS splicing services that you can use:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/04/30/meta-identity-content-ok-then-lifestreams/

Also see a post on Friendstreams and Lifestreams groups and more:

http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/07/22/lifestream-groups/

http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/07/22/friendstreams/

http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/07/26/centre-of-my-web-20-universe/

Lifestream blog is a good place to keep up:

http://lifestreamblog.com/

[ann michael]

Steve - I may be the lone voice in the woods here, but I just recently unsubscribed from your default feed (lifestream) and subscribed to just micropersuasion. I get your Twitter updates through IM so they were just noise to me when mixed in with this feed.

I do like the journal and diary ideas that a couple of people mentioned in the comments.

[dave]

You might find this interesting -- http://readr.com. It creates lifestreams for you and your friends, then gives you a Facebook-style "news feed" of what your friends are up to.

[ozgur alaz]

Facebook and Ziki.com are the new lifestreaming places.

[ozgur alaz]

Could monetization model of lifestreaming be CRM?

Lifestreaming gives deep insights about customers. Brands will delight about this insights

[Olivier D. alias ze kat]

I hardly work on LiFE2Front/LiFE-Line concept which (I hope) become Lifestream Rolls Royce :o) .oO(intelligently ordered with nice UI)...

See my sign for example.

[Mega Man]

There's a new lifestream website call onaswarm. Use "RWW" to get a quick invite.

I like the way it takes my login id's and finds all my feeds for me.