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?