Lifestreams – Interactive Automated Social Media

For a number of years now the web has been expanding into new horizons, with the progressive enhancements of web development as the driving force we are beginning to see more and more free open source methods to convey and display information. This goes beyong the new media hash and rehash so many of us are use to seeing, into a new dimension, not just of thought, but of being.

I have been thinking about this rather a lot just recently, mulling over the possibilities and implications of pursuing such courses. The big question that still hangs doubt in my mind, is why bother? do your family and friends really care what you are doing, maybe, maybe not, it depends on who you are and what you are doing I suppose.

This rise in whats become known as “life streams” (nothing to do the FFVII) has been ignited with inspiration from applications such as twitter and facebook, which push this prospect of a news feed of your life. What facebook began has now escalated into a snowball of twitter clients talking to RSS which amalgamate and parse RSS feeds, all of which leading to the possibility of having an ever updating feed, in which your actions become the catalyst for the events displayed. This is particularly interesting when you think of services such as last.fm and many others which offer you the potential to share your actions with others.

Perhaps then this is the natural progression from the blogging phenomenon. Maybe this should be seen as then natural first step, there are already pioneers who are pushing these ideas forward, making headway for the next big online social enterprise. In the meantime while I ponder over the possibilities here are a couple of good links to examples where these new waters are being tested.

Yale Lifestream project

Lifestream open source PHP script

Tumbling sox lifestream

FriendFeed lifestreaming solution