Welcome to my lifestream!

January 2 2010, 11:13am

"Blogs are evolving. You're looking at my Lifestream, a real-time flow of my activity across various websites, with the occasional blog post for nourishment."

That's the standard introductory text included in a new Sweetcron installation - and Sweetcron is the tool used to maintain my brand new lifestream. Welcome and thanks for passing by! :)

What is this all about?

I came upon the concept of lifestreaming when I was looking for a convenient tool to save Twitter messages for further use. On one page, I found a blog entry listing a few options: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_ways_to_archive_your_tweets.php. Apart from special applications designed to do just that I also noticed three software packages for what they called "lifestreaming": SweetCron, AmpliFeeder, and Storytlr.

I instantly got interested in this subject as the concept of lifestreaming promised to be a solution to a problem I have thought about quite often recently: What to do with one's own contributions on the one hand, maybe collected in a personal blog, and one's activities in various Web 2.0 communities - where discussions really take place?

Lifestreaming prevents from a fragmented personality

If you want to be read nowadays, I feel, you have to post your thoughts to various places where the exchange of ideas really happens: Share internet links via delicious, present photos on flickr and talk about books on librarything. Setting up a profile and posting reviews and discussion entries is easily done. There are also various other people with similar interests that make all the communities quite valuable for the sharing of ideas with specific target groups - the problem only is that not only posters themselves might lose track of their activities, also people interested in what a particular person publishes online often don't have the chance to follow all activities in the various platforms.

In previous days we experienced the predominance of single blogs, little publications which received more or less attention but where seldom tightly interconnected in a network - nowadays we see very well developed networks for various purposes, but it is difficult to get an overall picture of people: the result is a somewhat fragmented personality. Setting up a lifestream may help to restore a person's unified internet appearance while at the same time preserving the chance to participate in various Web 2.0 communities.

How does it work?

Sweetcron - or any other lifestreaming application - simply combines all RSS feeds from various communities and displays them on one page. And if you invest a bit of time into creating (or adapting) a nice theme the postings from different sources will also be displayed in a different format, so that contributions from delicious can be instantly distinguished from book reviews coming from librarything or photos from flickr.

But Sweetcron does not only display the various feeds on one page - and thereby creates quite a complete picture of one's online activities, a kind of portfolio -; it also stores their content in its own database and thus creates a backup copy. It collects one's contributions from communities that may be gone one day (though this seems quite unlikely in most cases) and stores them in a personally owned database: Sweetcron helps people to maintain ownership of their postings also physically and makes them independent from the goodwill and policies of the various internet communities. Contributions posted in a Web 2.0 community and backuped in a personal lifestream have never been produced in vain, should the service be turned off one day.

Weblog included!

The really cool thing about Sweetcron - and a feature that makes it stand out against other competitors - is the built-in blog functionality. You have the opportunity to publish your own postings without having to regard any limitations by an online community (like the 140 characters in Twitter) at any time within your lifestream thanks to the text editor Sweetcron offers. I used to work with Wordpress for some years now and despite the fact that I'm changing the elaborate blogging software for a simple text editor with Sweetcron now (see e.g. http://www.pixelgraphix.de/medien/Write-Sweetcron-Admin-Panel-20081101-160222.jpg) it is still perfect for my needs.

The blog editor allows me to just type away and quickly publish a general article that does not fit in any of the online communities I belong to. Many of the functions offered by an advanced Wordpress installation with various plugins have been taken over by Web 2.0 services (which are included in my page by RSS feeds) anyway. It only needs a simple text editor as this one to complement the incoming streams. And: There won't be any updates to install (which really started to get on my nerves with Wordpress) - because there isn't really much to improve with this simple, yet powerful concept.

Impersonal experience?

Yongfook, the author of Sweetcron, recently moved his personal page from his own Sweetcron installation to a shared service with Posterous: http://yongfook.com/why-posterous-instead-of-sweetcron. He mentioned two main reasons for doing so. First, he says that he prefers hosted services which save him the trouble of playing around with software installations on his own server. I can understand that as with every CMS I installed and tried out I also hoped that I won't have to do that for some time: integrating plugins, playing around with a theme ... Also adapting Sweetcron to my needs took me some time, yet this time I'm somewhat more optimistic that Sweetcron could serve my purposes much longer that earlier software packages due to its flexibility to quickly integrate all kinds of new projects I might choose to join. And in the end: The data is on my server and I have always preferred it that way.

Second, Yongfook describes that with his lifestream

the lack of real audience interaction meant it ended up as quite an impersonal experience.

According to my view, this is completely normal with a lifestream. As I mentioned above, the lifestream just combines content from various communities and displays it on a page. But the real interaction, the real discussions take place somewhere else. Why should someone comment on a book review I posted on librarything on my page rather than where it belongs - on librarything? I don't expect visitors to interact a lot on my lifestream, except when it comes to blog postings that can only be found here, maybe. And if someone only wants to get in touch with me by commenting on my flickr-photos - fine. But a lifestream such as this at least offers people to see what other activities I take part in and to quickly find my profile in various communities without having to search all the sites. This is the true value of a lifestream, I think: If a service is not mentioned in my lifestream then I'm not active there.

In his posting, Yongfook also mentions blog owners who aim at providing content maintenance-free: "No more writing blog posts!" Of course that won't work. I have seen lifestreams giving pages of last.fm-lists (MP3s the owner of the lifestream listens to) or combined Google Reader streams of interesting blogs the owner of the lifestream wants to share. Clearly such pages won't attract readers very much. But if active participation in various communities, the intelligent use of filters to avoid double posting of entries (e.g. a delicious link via delicious and twitter) and interesting content in the form of RSS generated streams enriched by extensive blog postings now and then are combined - I see no reason why such a lifestream shouldn't be a success.