<rant>

Here is something that has been bothering me for a while - the word ‘lifestreaming’ - especially in relation to services like FriendFeed, Socialthing and others aggregators.

Everybody seems to be hellbend on calling every new social media aggregator a “lifestreaming service”. But have you looked at the ‘everyone’ feed on FriendFeed? Nothing on there comes very close to ‘lifestreaming.’

Pretty much everything I do online goes into my FriendFeed, but that is not my life - it’s part of my life - but it’s not enough to call it ‘lifestreaming.’ I hope most of us lead lives that go at least a little bit beyond the stuff we do on the net.

Now those kids with the cameras on their hats 24/7 - those are lifestreamers - and God knows how boring watching those people is unless they are about to get laid, get in a fight, or do an interview with somebody a lot more interesting than they are.

While our personalities surely show through when we write online, post Flickr photos, twitter etc. - for 99% of people, this is just a minor part of their life. I know blogging is supposed to be raw, direct and personal, but that doesn’t mean that most people online do not put on at least some kind of a public persona. And let’s face it - most of us don’t care to read about the minutia of most people’s lives.

Anyway - just had to get that out of my system.

</rant>


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7 Comments so far

  1. rizzn on March 26, 2008 1:35 am

    actually, the preferred nomenclature the kids with the funny hats like is lifecasters, i think.

  2. Corvida on March 26, 2008 9:08 am

    Maybe it should be called online lifestreaming then? What other name would you propose?

  3. Frederic on March 26, 2008 9:31 am

    @rizzn - absolutely correct - but I was mostly talking about it in the sense of what the word ‘lifestreaming’ should refer to.

  4. Aggregation And Lifestreaming: What’s The Difference? | SheGeeks on March 26, 2008 10:25 am

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  5. links for 2008-07-06 - schorleblog on July 5, 2008 10:33 pm

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  7. Are you streaming your life? on September 4, 2008 9:41 am

    […] Lifestreaming is een trend die je niet kan tegenhouden. Ik zoek al langer een aangenamere en aantrekkelijke manier om mijn aanwezigheid of het Net weer te geven, dan met FriendFeed, want velen zullen het met mij eens zijn dat aggregeren niet hetzelfde is als lifestreaming. […]

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