Lifestreaming - the next development in social media?

Try to keep up to date with the latest social & digital marketing trends can be hard. While platforms come and go (MySpace?) the trend towards real time is increasing. This shift to near real time documentation of events, thoughts and activity is growing. A new term for this phenomenon is 'lifestreaming'. In this article we outline what lifestreaming is and why it is important to know about for your business.


What is lifestreaming?
Lifestreaming is the latest phenomenon that evolves from the field of social media. In a nutshell, it is an online diary that documents someone’s daily life in chronologically order (See the wordspy definition)


Lifestreaming can simply mean to blog in a new style. Lifestreams include thoughts, observations, links and records from everyday life. Contrary to standard blog posts, they are short and random. And, frequently, videos or pictures are inserted to convey meaning. Julia Allison’s blog is exemplary for this kind of lifestreaming. By sharing her opinions and day-to-day events in a very succinctly way, she has reached web celebrity status. Interestingly, her blog does not read vertically like common blogs, but horizontally, which mimics a timeline

Having said that, a lifestream is also the aggregation of content from different social networking sites. Lifestream services gather a person’s online activity and broadcast it from a single entry. All of these services are based on the fact that it becomes increasingly difficult for friends, family and colleagues to keep track of a person’s online presence, since people use more and more social networking platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Flickr, to mention just a few.


Tumblr and FriendsFeed are very similar lifestreaming services. Both are able to merge existing RSS-approved social networking accounts and they also allow its members to post content from the application itself.

Another lifestreaming service is called posterous. Here, members send the desired content, which can be any type of file, as an attachment of an email. A famous member of posterous is the well-known (former) blogger Steve Rubel. He states that “blogging feels old” and that posterous “feels more like flow.”


In one of his posts, he uses this diagram to illustrate how he gets inspired. For example, he uses FriendsFeed as his first filter for all his web actions. He then collects all relevant information in his email account. From there, he sends it to posterous, which in turn, automatically updates some of his other networking sites accounts.


Profilactic, yet another lifestream service, enables members to import information from more than 150 services. However, there is no possibility to post content directly from this website. This means, it is an online media aggregator per se.


Who should use lifestreaming service?
Everybody who is enthusiastic and excited about social networking and who has multiple accounts can use lifestreaming services.


What makes a good lifestream?
In order to create an entertaining lifestream, users should publish information from all facets of their lives. This can include news or reviews of local events, as well as videos, pictures or texts that feature their hobbies and interests. Further, regular updates about the working and personal life is a good idea. Finally, posts about interesting, amusing, funny or bizarre things are very popular.


Why is lifestreaming important?
As we move towards a more 'real time' web where things happen near instantly, lifestreaming will become more important and more common place. Those individuals or companies who are able to relay information to their audience sooner rather than later will end up being remembered in the minds of their target audience than some of their competitors.


Summary
We believe that in the coming years lifestreaming may end up becoming a full time job for online marketers and businesses as the move into online & social networking becomes even more important to businesses of all size. We have already seen individuals and businesses make this fundamental shift towards the real time and expect this trend to continue in 2009 and accelerate in 2010.