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Aggregation is not lifestreaming

<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>

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

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

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

[...] of The Last Podcast as an interesting rant about aggregation not being the same thing as lifestreaming. Here’s an excerpt that sums up his frustrations pretty nicely: Everybody seems to be [...]

[...] aggregation is not lifestreaming : the last podcast ich vermute, dass dieser text, auch wenn er noch so wahr ist, eine ähnliche wirkung hat, wie die diskussionen über den artikel vor blog. trotzdem: die aggregatoren sind kein “lebensstrom”, allenfalls eine stromschnelle (tags: kritik lifestream leben stream friendfeed socialthing swurl aggregat www via:mento.info) [...]

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most of us don’t care to read about the minutia of most people’s lives.