Ican crawl inside Mark Krynsky’s head. I can see what music he’s listening to, what he’s reading and watching, who his friends are, where he’s at, what he’s doing. I’ve never met Mark, but I know he listens to U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers. He recently rented Pirates of the Caribbean. He likes microbrewed beer. The other day, he started his morning with work meetings. And all the information is on one screen.
Krynsky, who lives near Los Angeles, is an early adopter of “lifestreaming,” which is a record of everything he does online, all in real time. “The cool thing about lifestreaming is you get to gaze into people to learn a lot that you might not otherwise know about them,” Krynsky told me. “You get an idea about what’s going with their lives in a way that you don’t have to interact, but you build all this knowledge and information.”
Krynsky typifies the people who have pioneered lifestreaming. He’s a project manager who focuses on website development and has the technical skills to design a custom lifestream that grabs data from the sites he uses. But the future of lifestreaming will be much broader-reaching. In the last year, more than 30 companies that are “social aggregators” have sprung up to make it easier for regular computer users. The sites take everything you are doing on the Internet and combine them in one place. The result tells you everything your friends are doing.
Yes. Everything.
An extreme example of lifestreaming popped up last year when Justin Kan attached a webcam to his hat and decided that he would wear the camera at all times, with streaming live video and audio, attracting the attention of news outlets like the Today Show and NPR. The experiment morphed into Justin.tv, which is a network of streaming video channels (many of which are lifecasts); it also allows chat at the same time.
But the company that’s drawing the most attention in this arena is FriendFeed. It launched to the public in late February and was founded by four former Google employees who were instrumental in the creation of Google Maps and Gmail, generally recognized as two applications that have changed the way many people use the Internet.
One of the goals of the site is to guide users through the Internet. Back when everyone read their hometown paper and watched the same three network TV channels, people more or less had a common media experience that they could share. But now, with access to millions of blogs, videos and news sources, how do users sort through the mass of information?
Let your friends show you: That’s what FriendFeed believes. The site takes the idea of sharing—like when Mom sends you a newspaper clipping or doubles of photographs—and upgrades it to make it instantaneous to all the people you know. What sets FriendFeed apart from some of its competitors is that it fosters a conversation about what’s posted. Rather than the anonymous and often disparaging comments posted on a site like YouTube, the comments left on FriendFeed under a video go out to people reading your stream of information: So they know you, either in real life or through an online relationship, creating a group conversation.
“One thing we’ve discovered is that email is not the perfect medium for every kind of conversation,” said Paul Buchheit, a co-founder of FriendFeed. “If you are sharing funny links of good videos or an interesting article, email turns out not to be the best way to share those…it can pile up and you start to feel guilty and anxious and not sure if you’re ever going to catch up.”
Instead, FriendFeed is more passive. You can scan what’s posted and look at what interests you. If you have a friend that sends out too many blasts (mini updates about what you’re doing that go to your social network) you can turn them (or just their Twitter feeds) off. And since FriendFeed is a one-way relationship—you subscribe to your friends rather than it being a two-way relationship on sites like Facebook or MySpace where they have to accept the friendship—they will never know you blocked them, avoiding hurt feelings.
Turning people off—or at least certain aspects of what they put online—will likely become essential in social networking’s future. As sites like FriendFeed make it easy to blast out anything that interests you, the volume of material from people you know could be daunting. As the site evolves, FriendFeed is thinking of ways to manage this. After returning from a two-week trip to Peru, it was daunting for co-founder Bret Taylor to go through what he’d missed on FriendFeed since he’d left. So last week, they pushed out a feature that uses an algorithm to determine the most important things he’d missed: all based on the number of comments, how much friends said they liked the post, and other signals.
But many users of lifestreaming services like the constant flow of information. Leisa Reichelt, who’s based in London and researches online user experience, coined the term “ambient intimacy” to describe the level of familiarity that develops with those in our social circle who we don’t see regularly but can keep up with the mundane details of their life—their new haircut, what they’re eating for lunch—through technology.
“Who cares? Who wants this level of detail?” Reichelt wrote last year. “There are a lot of us though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to the people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.
Electronic communication has lowered the “cost” of finding out what’s going on with those you know, said Kevin Lim, a tech blogger who is a doctoral student in communications at the University of Buffalo in New York. Some will call very few people in their social network but are interested to find out what’s going on with a lot of people if it’s easy enough, he said.
Lim is especially interested by the idea that this type of intimate knowledge of the mundane can speed up the feeling of trust. Most people, Lim thinks, are literate enough online that they can sense when someone is a liar. This theory gets scary, however, when you think about children and teens online and all the horror stories of Internet predators.
Aside from dangers that lurk online, we may simply have acquaintances who we don’t want to have access to everything we do. A year after Reichelt wrote about ambient intimacy, she adjusted her views: The longer someone uses a social network, the more it gets populated with those from different aspects of our lives—like bosses or colleagues—that we may not want listening to all of our inner thoughts. So having the same level of intimacy with people we want to stay close with risks some exposure, Reichelt wrote in April.
Plaxo, a competitor of FriendFeed, is trying to tackle that problem. In Plaxo Pulse, their social aggregator program, users can label their contacts as “friend,” “family” or “business,” and then they can share certain personal aspects with certain groups, such as photos only going to family members, said John McCrea, vice president of marketing.
But how do lifestreaming companies reach out to the millions of Americans who don’t even comprehend the concept?
Adam Kazwell is a 28-year-old FriendFeed aficionado, but he attempts to get his girlfriend or parents to use the service haven’t worked. And he doesn’t expect them adopt the habit anytime soon. But he thinks that as more people use services like Facebook and technology like camera phones, that will change.
“People will become comfortable with the idea of sharing things more often,” said Kazwell, who lives in San Francisco and works for the blogging company LiveJournal. “Sharing will increase and tools like FriendFeed will help.”
The battle to be the dominant tool to do this is underway. Buchheit said that while some of FriendFeed’s rising prominence will just be the process of natural growth (they are growing at an incredible three-fold rate every month) there is a need to simplify the user experience. For someone that hasn’t used a service like this, signing on to FriendFeed can be intimidating.
“Part of it is explaining the product to people better,” Buchheit said. “We hired a summer intern that will be working on a number of videos taking people through what is FriendFeed and why it can be relevant to them, and how to use it.”
Plaxo’s McCrea said that he hasn’t seen this pace of change in the Internet since the mid-1990s. McCrea compared social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace with “walled gardens”—they are easy to use, but everything happening on these sites stays within the program, only drawing in a few things from the larger world of the Internet. In contrast, social aggregators draw from everywhere on the Internet.
Back in the mid-1990s, there was the battle between servers like Prodigy and America Online that offered subscribers lots of services, but they were closed networks. In the same way that the more open Web model won out more than a decade ago, McCrea thinks the more open social aggregator model will be dominant.
“We are in an unprecedented phase when all the big companies are racing each other to see who can open up the fastest,” McCrea said.
In response to the demand, Facebook now enables users to share their activity on other sites, like the photo site Flickr and the review site Yelp, but doesn’t do so to the level of sites like Plaxo Pulse.
But others, like Duy Linh Tu, the coordinator of the New Media Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, thinks that social aggregators have been over-hyped.
“Users are finally experiencing social network fatigue,” he said. “It’s just another site to administer. It’s become tedious.”
Most people don’t have the time to devote to sites like these, he said. And he thinks that social networking sites like Friendster and Facebook all have built-in expiration dates because of the “cool kid rule.”
“If your mom is hanging out at the same club that you’re going to, what do you do? You find a cooler club,” he said. “Moms are now on Facebook, so kids will move on.
Technology that automatically notifies others about what’s happening in our lives is going to become commonplace, Lim said. Services like Dodgeball notify a user if their friends are around, and services like Brightkite take it one step further by allowing you to create a social network and befriend people based on where you are. Global Positioning Systems will become more common in phones—so you can press a button and automatically let people know where you are—and in cameras, which will time- and location- stamp a photo that you can then blast to your friends.
Soon, objects will lifestream, and your car will tell you if you need to get an oil change or a fill up. A group that formed at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program developed a system this winter that allows a plant to Twitter and tell you when it needs to be watered.
Lifecasting will become an easy and subtle part of our lives, Lim believes.
“We are starting to see a shift where it’s not really a decision of whether to join, you have to decide not to join,” Lim said of services with a lifestreaming component. “It’s getting so easy to the point it is ubiquitous.”
Social Networking On The Web: An Abuser's Manual
Brightkite – A mobile social network that lets you track your friends and meet others based on where you are.
Dodgeball – An application that uses a phone to tell your friends where you are, and it let’s you find people near you.
Flickr – A site that allows for photo and video posting and sharing.
FriendFeed – A service that allows a user to see what websites, videos, photos and music their friends are sharing, and to have an online conversation about them.
Justin.tv – A network of streaming video channels, many of which are lifecasts. The site also allows for chatting.
Plaxo Pulse – A service of the Internet company Plaxo that allows users to share content across the Web with their social network.
Twitter – A micro-blogging service that allows a user to send out blasts about what they are doing from the Twitter site, their phone, instant messaging or a third-party program like Facebook.
Yelp – A site where users can post reviews of restaurants, stores, etc. and share them with friends.
Krynsky, who lives near Los Angeles, is an early adopter of “lifestreaming,” which is a record of everything he does online, all in real time. “The cool thing about lifestreaming is you get to gaze into people to learn a lot that you might not otherwise know about them,” Krynsky told me. “You get an idea about what’s going with their lives in a way that you don’t have to interact, but you build all this knowledge and information.”
Krynsky typifies the people who have pioneered lifestreaming. He’s a project manager who focuses on website development and has the technical skills to design a custom lifestream that grabs data from the sites he uses. But the future of lifestreaming will be much broader-reaching. In the last year, more than 30 companies that are “social aggregators” have sprung up to make it easier for regular computer users. The sites take everything you are doing on the Internet and combine them in one place. The result tells you everything your friends are doing.
Yes. Everything.
An extreme example of lifestreaming popped up last year when Justin Kan attached a webcam to his hat and decided that he would wear the camera at all times, with streaming live video and audio, attracting the attention of news outlets like the Today Show and NPR. The experiment morphed into Justin.tv, which is a network of streaming video channels (many of which are lifecasts); it also allows chat at the same time.
But the company that’s drawing the most attention in this arena is FriendFeed. It launched to the public in late February and was founded by four former Google employees who were instrumental in the creation of Google Maps and Gmail, generally recognized as two applications that have changed the way many people use the Internet.
One of the goals of the site is to guide users through the Internet. Back when everyone read their hometown paper and watched the same three network TV channels, people more or less had a common media experience that they could share. But now, with access to millions of blogs, videos and news sources, how do users sort through the mass of information?
Let your friends show you: That’s what FriendFeed believes. The site takes the idea of sharing—like when Mom sends you a newspaper clipping or doubles of photographs—and upgrades it to make it instantaneous to all the people you know. What sets FriendFeed apart from some of its competitors is that it fosters a conversation about what’s posted. Rather than the anonymous and often disparaging comments posted on a site like YouTube, the comments left on FriendFeed under a video go out to people reading your stream of information: So they know you, either in real life or through an online relationship, creating a group conversation.
“One thing we’ve discovered is that email is not the perfect medium for every kind of conversation,” said Paul Buchheit, a co-founder of FriendFeed. “If you are sharing funny links of good videos or an interesting article, email turns out not to be the best way to share those…it can pile up and you start to feel guilty and anxious and not sure if you’re ever going to catch up.”
Instead, FriendFeed is more passive. You can scan what’s posted and look at what interests you. If you have a friend that sends out too many blasts (mini updates about what you’re doing that go to your social network) you can turn them (or just their Twitter feeds) off. And since FriendFeed is a one-way relationship—you subscribe to your friends rather than it being a two-way relationship on sites like Facebook or MySpace where they have to accept the friendship—they will never know you blocked them, avoiding hurt feelings.
Turning people off—or at least certain aspects of what they put online—will likely become essential in social networking’s future. As sites like FriendFeed make it easy to blast out anything that interests you, the volume of material from people you know could be daunting. As the site evolves, FriendFeed is thinking of ways to manage this. After returning from a two-week trip to Peru, it was daunting for co-founder Bret Taylor to go through what he’d missed on FriendFeed since he’d left. So last week, they pushed out a feature that uses an algorithm to determine the most important things he’d missed: all based on the number of comments, how much friends said they liked the post, and other signals.
But many users of lifestreaming services like the constant flow of information. Leisa Reichelt, who’s based in London and researches online user experience, coined the term “ambient intimacy” to describe the level of familiarity that develops with those in our social circle who we don’t see regularly but can keep up with the mundane details of their life—their new haircut, what they’re eating for lunch—through technology.
“Who cares? Who wants this level of detail?” Reichelt wrote last year. “There are a lot of us though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to the people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.
Electronic communication has lowered the “cost” of finding out what’s going on with those you know, said Kevin Lim, a tech blogger who is a doctoral student in communications at the University of Buffalo in New York. Some will call very few people in their social network but are interested to find out what’s going on with a lot of people if it’s easy enough, he said.
Lim is especially interested by the idea that this type of intimate knowledge of the mundane can speed up the feeling of trust. Most people, Lim thinks, are literate enough online that they can sense when someone is a liar. This theory gets scary, however, when you think about children and teens online and all the horror stories of Internet predators.
Aside from dangers that lurk online, we may simply have acquaintances who we don’t want to have access to everything we do. A year after Reichelt wrote about ambient intimacy, she adjusted her views: The longer someone uses a social network, the more it gets populated with those from different aspects of our lives—like bosses or colleagues—that we may not want listening to all of our inner thoughts. So having the same level of intimacy with people we want to stay close with risks some exposure, Reichelt wrote in April.
Plaxo, a competitor of FriendFeed, is trying to tackle that problem. In Plaxo Pulse, their social aggregator program, users can label their contacts as “friend,” “family” or “business,” and then they can share certain personal aspects with certain groups, such as photos only going to family members, said John McCrea, vice president of marketing.
But how do lifestreaming companies reach out to the millions of Americans who don’t even comprehend the concept?
Adam Kazwell is a 28-year-old FriendFeed aficionado, but he attempts to get his girlfriend or parents to use the service haven’t worked. And he doesn’t expect them adopt the habit anytime soon. But he thinks that as more people use services like Facebook and technology like camera phones, that will change.
“People will become comfortable with the idea of sharing things more often,” said Kazwell, who lives in San Francisco and works for the blogging company LiveJournal. “Sharing will increase and tools like FriendFeed will help.”
The battle to be the dominant tool to do this is underway. Buchheit said that while some of FriendFeed’s rising prominence will just be the process of natural growth (they are growing at an incredible three-fold rate every month) there is a need to simplify the user experience. For someone that hasn’t used a service like this, signing on to FriendFeed can be intimidating.
“Part of it is explaining the product to people better,” Buchheit said. “We hired a summer intern that will be working on a number of videos taking people through what is FriendFeed and why it can be relevant to them, and how to use it.”
Plaxo’s McCrea said that he hasn’t seen this pace of change in the Internet since the mid-1990s. McCrea compared social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace with “walled gardens”—they are easy to use, but everything happening on these sites stays within the program, only drawing in a few things from the larger world of the Internet. In contrast, social aggregators draw from everywhere on the Internet.
Back in the mid-1990s, there was the battle between servers like Prodigy and America Online that offered subscribers lots of services, but they were closed networks. In the same way that the more open Web model won out more than a decade ago, McCrea thinks the more open social aggregator model will be dominant.
“We are in an unprecedented phase when all the big companies are racing each other to see who can open up the fastest,” McCrea said.
In response to the demand, Facebook now enables users to share their activity on other sites, like the photo site Flickr and the review site Yelp, but doesn’t do so to the level of sites like Plaxo Pulse.
But others, like Duy Linh Tu, the coordinator of the New Media Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, thinks that social aggregators have been over-hyped.
“Users are finally experiencing social network fatigue,” he said. “It’s just another site to administer. It’s become tedious.”
Most people don’t have the time to devote to sites like these, he said. And he thinks that social networking sites like Friendster and Facebook all have built-in expiration dates because of the “cool kid rule.”
“If your mom is hanging out at the same club that you’re going to, what do you do? You find a cooler club,” he said. “Moms are now on Facebook, so kids will move on.
Technology that automatically notifies others about what’s happening in our lives is going to become commonplace, Lim said. Services like Dodgeball notify a user if their friends are around, and services like Brightkite take it one step further by allowing you to create a social network and befriend people based on where you are. Global Positioning Systems will become more common in phones—so you can press a button and automatically let people know where you are—and in cameras, which will time- and location- stamp a photo that you can then blast to your friends.
Soon, objects will lifestream, and your car will tell you if you need to get an oil change or a fill up. A group that formed at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program developed a system this winter that allows a plant to Twitter and tell you when it needs to be watered.
Lifecasting will become an easy and subtle part of our lives, Lim believes.
“We are starting to see a shift where it’s not really a decision of whether to join, you have to decide not to join,” Lim said of services with a lifestreaming component. “It’s getting so easy to the point it is ubiquitous.”
Social Networking On The Web: An Abuser's Manual
Brightkite – A mobile social network that lets you track your friends and meet others based on where you are.
Dodgeball – An application that uses a phone to tell your friends where you are, and it let’s you find people near you.
Flickr – A site that allows for photo and video posting and sharing.
FriendFeed – A service that allows a user to see what websites, videos, photos and music their friends are sharing, and to have an online conversation about them.
Justin.tv – A network of streaming video channels, many of which are lifecasts. The site also allows for chatting.
Plaxo Pulse – A service of the Internet company Plaxo that allows users to share content across the Web with their social network.
Twitter – A micro-blogging service that allows a user to send out blasts about what they are doing from the Twitter site, their phone, instant messaging or a third-party program like Facebook.
Yelp – A site where users can post reviews of restaurants, stores, etc. and share them with friends.
