Sometimes one blog post will provide insight into a seemingly unrelated blog post. This most recent insight allowed me to grasp something that Alexander van Elsas wrote a number of weeks ago about one of his complaints about FriendFeed: the lack of intentional sharing.
Sarah Perez’s post at ReadWriteWeb, The future of blogging revealed, discusses the apparent rise of the lifestreaming phenomenon. Sarah describes lifestreaming quite well in her article. In simplified terms, lifestreaming is a persistent automatic sharing of various kinds of creative content that you generate on various Web services.
Some people would consider FriendFeed to be a lifestreaming application which you can direct the RSS feeds from blogs; photo sharing applications; video sharing applications; various consumer services like Amazon.com and Netflix; blog commenting systems; and other miscellaneous web applications. Swurl, Jaiku, and SocialThing are other examples of these services. Sarah also mentions a couple of newer services that handle lifestreaming.
From Sarah’s blog post:
There was a time when casual, personal blogging was your way to communicate with your friends on the web. Via posts, commenting, and blogrolls, bloggers formed niche communities on the web to socialize with each other. Today, new tools provide that same level of socialization - perhaps even better than blogging ever could. Via micro-blogging sites like Twitter, every quick thought or link can be shared with your community of followers and you can see theirs, too. You can join and exit the never-ending conversation at your leisure. Plus, other social sites like FriendFeed provide today’s new discussion boards where conversation occurs surrounding the items posted and shared, leading to even more of a community feel, and one that’s drawing more users every day.
Sites and social tools like these and many others encourage more participation on the social web than ever before. Although the social participants on these sites are often more active in socializing than they are in blogging, there’s still that need to stake out your own piece of real estate on the web. But we wonder: does that really need to be a blog anymore? Perhaps not.
Sarah’s article reminded me of Alexander vanElsas’s article Why I don’t like FriendFeed as much as I wanted, it lacks intention. For a long time I struggled with Alexander’s use of the word “intention” and then lost the train of thought. Sarah’s article helped me refocus on Alexander’s point, however.
In Alexander’s point of view, although we may do a lot of things during the course of the day, many of them won’t be very interesting to anyone except ourselves (although we don’t always know which ones our audience will find interesting). Alexander then goes on to say that a service like Twitter can be more valuable because you selectively decide what you are going to post as a Tweet. In other words, there is specific intent to share an item that we think is valuable. With lifestreaming or content aggregators, you get everything, like the infamous “firehouse” analogy that’s used by people to describe the raw amounts of text, images, and links that appear in FriendFeed streams.
With blogging, you normally have selective sharing of information, although it can be automated to resemble lifestreaming in many ways. Lifestreaming applications don’t filter or eliminate specific items from a stream: you get everything from that stream or nothing (unless the tools become more sophisticated, but in a sense that would fly in the face of the intent of lifestreaming).
Using my own biases and filters, I’ve taken these two ideas and propose the following:
- Traditional blogging is a more introverted form of communication and interaction
- Lifestreaming is a more extroverted form of the same
It’s true that bloggers aren’t all the same. Some bloggers keep no secrets and live their entire lives in full view, so in effect they’ve been lifestreaming for ages using these tools. They don’t hold anything back, they let it all out, especially personal bloggers.
However, many of us don’t write about everything in our lives, particularly if we are professional or niche bloggers. We pick and choose the content that we publish based on our own preferences and our assumptions about the kind of material that our audience wants to read. Many of us do not mix the personal or professional or else we do it in controlled ways. There is intent behind what we share – we share for a purpose in a way that we are comfortable doing.
There can still be a certain amount of intent and selectiveness when following a lifestreaming model, but again, it’s harder to be selective. Instead of choosing what to share (blogging), you have to choose what you don’t want to share (lifestreaming). For an extrovert, someone who may be more comfortable socializing and sharing information about themselves, lifestreaming is probably a better option, especially since lifestreaming is so automated that it doesn’t take much time or effort away from socializing.
In fact, I’d argue that lifestreaming is probably a better way to increase social media adoption amongst non-users, because it’s a low cost, low maintenance way to build a social media presence. Just keep doing the things you do, feed the appropriate pipes with content, and it will spew out to the world. Introverts or private individuals probably won’t sign up for lifestreaming for the very same reasons. In fact, many of us won’t become bloggers, either, except for professional or niche interests which serve to meet other needs.
I’ve said my piece. What do you think? If lifestreaming a more extroverted activity? Will it appeal to the mainstream? Will it appeal to introverts?
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