The Added Dimensions of a Lifestream

Lifestreaming is a word you hear coming up a lot these days in the world of social media. For the unfamiliar, lifestreaming is the concept of aggregating all your little bits of life into one online stream. (Hats off to Josh Caton of Read Write Web for the succinct definition.)

For example, I primarily use two lifestreaming services: Tumblr and Friendfeed. I use Tumblr as my blog and as a lifestream. I write blog posts just as I would on any other blog platform. The added benefit is the ability to add RSS feeds that stream into Tumblr, each item serving as its own post. I feed Tumblr with my posts on iterasi and the photos I post on Flickr such as this one of Marshall Kirkpatrick this morning at Bipartisan a coffee shop in Portland. I can add three more feeds into my Tumblr. Make that two - I just added the Viddler feed for “My Office Has A Kitchen.”. :-)

Friendfeed is one of the most popular lifestreaming services. I can add about 30 sites into my Friendfeed. My Friendfeed updates each time I add an item to any of those sites such as Flickr, the iterasi blog, YouTube and Digg. What’s really cool, though, is the participation Friendfeed allows.

Here’s how Louis Gray summarized today the value that Friendfeed provides:

There’s a reason I’ve made more than 1,200 comments in FriendFeed since signing up in October, and why I’ve “Liked” almost 700 different items. It’s not because I have a bot set up to do my dirty work. It’s because it helps both those I follow, and those who follow me. Take away that participation, and FriendFeed becomes as quiet as a library, and just about as exciting.

But as in in life, there are experiences in that participation Louis talks about that I want to save and sometimes share with other people for future purposes. In today’s world, those experiences are not easily saved as they so quickly rush by in the lifestream.

iterasi: Adding Context To The Lifestream

I work at iterasi where we give people the tools to save and share web pages. What we provide is the ability to save moments in time, providing an added degree of relevance to our life experiences and in this context, our lifestream.

Working at iterasi, I increasingly ask myself, what about all the experiences that rush by me every day? What are the ways to preserve those micro points in time that appear so fast and rush by in a moment? What about the blog, photo or web site that is discovered by following the lifetream? You know it will be gone in a moment as your attention moves elsewhere. How do those experiences, those representations of time fit into the lifestream?

How can those moments, those representations of time, remain preserved and if you wish, shared as pieces that fit into your social history and that of the greater community? And if they are preserved do they enrich the lifestream experience by representing documents in time? Do they provide a broader perspective? And what use can they be?

The answer to these questions may may be well be with iterasi. When you add iterasi to your browswer, you may save and share any web page, preserving that point in time on that web page.

The concept of the lifestream is just emerging. Added dimensions will come as we develop historical context for the lifestream that like time itself, passes by all too fast.