If you are using multiple social media and social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Digg and Blogger then it can get quite troublesome to login to each service everyday to check for updates from your friends. Lifestreaming services like Friendfeed & Profilactic simplify this job by bringing together the updates from all such sites under one single lifestream.
The lifestreaming function works in two ways:
Lifestreaming aggregates all the social content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos posted by your friends and presents them into one single lifestream so that you need not follow your friends on each service separately.
Similarly when you yourselves add a new photo to Flickr, make a new blog post, update your Facebook status or tweet on Twitter, your lifestream will be updated accordingly for your friends to see. As such your contacts have access to all of the latest updates in your social media life from a single place, making it much easier to follow your latest news and online publishing habits.
Choosing a Lifestreaming Service?
There are many Lifestreaming services surfacing all over the internet. The larger ones include Friendfeed, Profilactic, Plaxo Pulse, Social Thing and Lifestrea.ms. So how do you choose a Lifestreaming service for your social needs?
Firstly, it should support your favourite social content site.
Profilactic supports as many as 190 social sites by default and in addition, you can add as many custom sites as you want. Friendfeed supports 43 services while iMinta supports 40.
However, don’t go by numbers alone. Just because a lifestreaming service supports numerous social sites, it is not necessary that it supports the ones you use. Before you select a service, check specifically whether it has support for all your favourite social sites.
Secondly, it should automatically import your friends from the services you add for creating a lifestream, instead of asking you to manually create a new list of friends all over again. The ability to automatically detect & import your contacts makes things a lot easier, both for initial set up and for adding new friends in the future.
Profilactic and Social Thing support this feature. In contrast, services like FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse, iMinta & Lifestrea.ms require you to invite your friends all over again and manually add new friends over time.
Thirdly, it should preferably allow posting back to the original service. This is a benefit that Social Thing & Lifestrea.ms has over FriendFeed by allowing users to send data back to social services. So if you want to respond to a friend’s tweet, you can do so directly from Social Thing and the reply would appear on Twitter. On the other hand, FriendFeed only allows reading data from original services but allows commenting only within Friendfeed.
Roundup of Some Popular Lifestreaming Services
Friendfeed is one of the most popular social aggregators amongst many other lifestreaming services. Friendfeed is better than other services as far as features and interface is concerned. However it disappoints due to its lack of support for automatically importing your friends. This problem can be partially offset by adding your friends who are not on Friendfeed as “imaginary friends” but you have to do this manually. Friendfeed is thus actually an individual social network by itself that allows aggregation of data from other sites.
Social Thing allows you to automatically import your friends from your social sites. However, it supports lesser number of social sites compared to others, though the important ones are covered. Subsequent to its acquisition by AOL, it has become a closed private beta. However, once this service is opened up, there is so much to look forward to.
Plaxo Pulse, Second Brain, iMinta & Lifestrea.ms are amongst the other services you should give a try before deciding on your favourite service.
It is important to mention Spokeo here. All you have to do is let Spokeo import your contacts’ email addresses and Spokeo will trace their activities across all the social sites. Sounds spooky and does raise the hackles of privacy advocates. But currently it only offers a free trial version and you need to pay to upgrade to a fully functional Pro version
Amongst the biggies, Facebook is also trying to enter the lifestreaming scene and Yahoo is already trying to make inroads with MyBlogLog.
Tumblr & Jaiku are microblogging services which also provide some lifestreaming functions.
But the service which really impresses out of the lot is Profilactic. With its support for almost every social site imaginable and its option to import friends directly, Profilactic has the makings of a true leader in lifestreaming services!
