A couple of days ago you might have noticed some changes in the blog (admittedly the first in a long time). Besides a new theme you might have seen a table containing a lot of small posts headed by the title “Lifestream”. Well you caught me in the middle of a new web project (the first in years) namely building a Lifestream. Before I send you over to the module of my web presence, let me shortly explain what I understand by Lifestream.
Imagine a typical Netizen e.g someone partizipating very actively in the Web 2.0 Lifestyle, is member of a large number of online communities (such as Facebook, Twitter, or Last.fm). In each of those communities the Netizen generates some kind of content, like posting small bits about his/her life, liking/disliking content from other users, posting media and contributing to discussions.
At some point it is difficult to follow all these activities especially if the follower is outside or only partially inside the communities. Sometimes the Netizen might have to start double posting any kind of particular content in order to reach all of his/her followers. Imagine you have “Friends” who are only active in StudiVZ or in Facebook, in order to share your latest holiday photos with them you hve to upload them to both communities.
This is where the Lifestream comes into play. Not being some kind of Gaian Elemental the Lifestream is actually a piece of software that aggregates the various information streams into one place. The easiest way to do that is using RSS-Feeds that most online communities provide. I leave the technical explanation on how to build the Lifestream to another post just let me tell you each RSS.Feed is different as is the representation of the content (video, audio, text, location).
Streaming the Feeds
So the Lifestream is medium to keep track of one’s activities across the internet without manually checking each plattform. The Lifestream I build past weekend so far contains 6 streams: Twitter, Last.fm, Google Reader, the Blog, StumbleUpon and my Location Feed (via FireEagle). All these feeds are streamed into a seperate web software (Sweetcron) where they are stripped of surplus information and put into a database.
Once you access the the web page with the Lifestream the software puts all seperate posts into a grid layout with the newst item in the upper left corner. Each stream has a different color and so far I tried to keep the information simple (few graphics and short texts). Usually the items have link sending you to the original source.
So if you’ve grown interested in seeing my Lifestream in action head over to the Site. Remember, the information there changes a lot faster than on a usual blog.
If you got any improvements or just want to voice you opinion on the subject, feel free to comment.
