OF Lifestreaming and Feeds: Who's Talking?

Feeling overfed lately? Sidle up to the trough, there's company here. Yes, subscribing to feed-based applications can be like drinking from a firehose, especially during times like these. When the daily news is itself the topic of presidential campaigns, late-night talk show hosts, politicians (relevant or not, incoming or outgoing), and the news media in general, being on a site like Friendfeed is a bit like Hussein Bolt gesturing for the Jumbotron at the Beijing Olympics.

The echo chamber is also a hall of mirrors.

All social media play some part in mirroring us, reflecting us, whether to ourselves or in front of others. And this doesn't make every social media user a narcissist. It simply admits to the shiny and reflective surface of the social media screen — and to the facts that we like to see ourselves reflected in this screen, and like to be seen by others. It's a particular kind of vanity, of self-image and self-promotion.

I've written about self-image and profile-based social networking, but haven't really applied it to lifestreaming. Of course lifestreaming apps like Twitter also mirror us back to ourselves -- indeed, it would be strange if we didn't see our own tweets alongside others. The production of a self-image online is essential to how lifestreaming works, and why. But oddly enough, original activity feeds weren't posted by users at all.

Facebook can be given credit for having popularized the feed: activity, news, status. Activity and news most of all (Yahoo and Friendster each had shout outs, as did many social networks have a mood option (even blogs have had mood options for inclusion with posting). But Facebook was feeding us system messages (still does). It's Facebook's inspired way of making the site seem more active than it is. Everything a user does is captured, recorded, and considered for re-telling. So in Facebook's case, it often is not the user doing the talking, but the system doing the talking: Facebook was the chamber, and Facebook was the echo.

It is easy to bundle applications together because they use the same forms, or contents. All feeds are not the same, and all lifestreaming services are not the same. Their use of activity streams, status updates, commenting, and variations on posting, etc., suggest common design and architecture in many cases, yes, but these commonalities may conceal substantial differences. A system message that reports on my activity, as in Facebook, doesn't appear to me as something I've said and I won't relate to it as if it were speech. Nor is it addressed to anyone in particular, either. But as it's produced by the system, it may have meta data, and embedded media types, that are better structured than what I may have used in writing/tweeting.

The matter of who's talking might read like a matter of small print and footnotes, but consider the fact that in lifestreaming apps all content is posted by users, and all content is intended by users. In lifestreaming apps users can talk by writing, recording, sharing, and so on -- the applications increase our ways of talking. But in all cases they are still about talk. Facebook, by contrast, is about the aggregating content around an audience (call it graph or network). User activity is documented in feeds -- it's not conversational but is informational (informative).

On a site like Facebook, as commanding a lead it has in the market, members need not be encouraged to lifestream. Facebook provides social utility even to low-participation users. It offers a broad number of application types as well as pages, groups, and of course profile-centric activity. But lifestreaming services, on the other hand, do have to encourage participation. Talk needs to be sustained, as well as user attention. Hence Friendfeed's integrated commenting, and close attention to supporting commenting.

Friendfeed are on opposing ends of the spectrum of talk tools-- Friendfeed at the conversational end of talk, Facebook at the profile end of talk. However, Friendfeed could build up profiles around conversation and talk. Being page-based, though, Friendfeed can do what Twitter likely won't: build up social navigation and content organization around page-based social media conventions. Friendfeed can build up social practices that sequentially extend value to those users who prefer lifestreaming to profile-based networking.




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Swurl: lifestreaming and timelining

Like many of you, I simply can't keep up with the river of lifestreaming applications hitting public beta this year. Many seem to simply do the same thing, more or less, with a bit more of this or a bit more of that to differentiate each from its competitors. But social apps are bound, perhaps more even than "conventional" software, to conform to best practices. Why? Because they are social applications. Social applications succeed only if they can extend the individual user experience out into new and interesting social experiences.

And they do have to be interesting -- for social applications, again more than conventional software, must be interesting. More often than not they are interesting because they are used as tools for talk. Talking with, to, at, amongst, in front of, behind, and to the side of. Talking with friends tends to be interesting to those involved simply because it is among friends. But where the face to face dimensions of social interaction are also rewarding for the obvious reasons, social applications must deliver a working substitute. There is no real "spending time together" online.

Even chatrooms, which are as much a precursor of lifestreaming as anything else online, can only approximate this sense of togetherness. I recall early days in IRC chatrooms where that sense of being there or of being in it was as much due to the suspense and waiting (for somebody to type out their response) as it was due to the "room" itself. One might even argue that this pressure of time grows in the user the slower the technology is to record and transmit time. The longer the latency, the greater the waiting, and thus the greater the anticipation, suspense, and urgency! (Is it not said that suspense in film is simply the time that it takes for something to happen?).

Swurl.com is interesting because it has a visual timeline of the lifestream (pictured above). In calendar format, and well-designed, the timeline looks good and is an attractive visual representation. It's low on conversational content and talk, but it captures the past of a user's activity in a compelling presentation. Plurk.com also has a timeline, but one that is used to steer interaction (and which looks more like a horizontal river display). Not only does Swurl's calendar provide thumbnails of pictures and shortcuts to posts, it expands to accommodate periods of heavy activity. All days do not look alike. I like that.

This variation is important in lifestreaming apps. In contrast to the profile-based site or service, the stream stands in for the profile. The person's talk stands in for profile elements. These choices make sense, because the call to action in a lifestreaming service is talk. It's not browsing, searching, or navigating. At least not quite yet (I believe we're ready for more order and structure). Really, each message/post/tweet in a lifestreaming app is its own call to (inter)action, which is also why most users are in it "now" or never.

Which makes Swurl's representation of past user activity interesting to me. Most lifestreaming have stayed away from the archive of past activity (what's the pleasure in paging backwards through a user's posts?). But there's a lot of value in past activity, and visual coverage of the past can take many forms (think Edward Tufte). We've seen none of them yet (Chirpscreen's slideshows come to mind, though it would be nice to see them become actionable) but I'm certain that we will.

If twitter is the power curve of lifestreaming, then apps like swurl might show us some of the value in the long tail -- the long tail being the past. To picture this, take the standard long tail graph and turn it sideways. The Present is the curve, the Past is the tail.

Mining the tail of time is mining in depth rather than mining across connections. Mining the connections of past time, for lifestreaming apps, might mean drawing connections across the past times (pastimes, experiences, too) of a site's users. Currently, Swurl engages conversations around a user and his or her posts. But we could imagine indexing user streams for the purpose of making connections and extracting content. After all, a user's post posts, talk, uploads, etc are used by many applications to predict or anticipate choices and preferences.

I'm excited to see what Swurl, with minimal complexity, has done to wrap a bit more around lifestreaming than we get out of tools like twitter. Twitter will remain for me my primary talk tool, as it has and will continue to have the best audience awareness. But if you wanted to imagine social networking, and profile-based social networking around lifestreaming instead of profile pages, Swurl would be a good place to start.

Join me on Swurl!


Related reading:
Readwriteweb on Swurl
Techcrunch on Swurl

[Resist] [Submit} ... advertising in facebook dialog boxes?

Here's a bug worth noting, if only for the fun of it. I've always wanted to see a dialog box pick up the cause of users everywhere by offering a choice of "submit" or "resist." Utterly useless of course. Perhaps an idea for a t-shirt.

Well this one must be a bug, because the I had just removed the exact same event successfully with options of "remove" or "do not remove." If this is social media marketing, it earns points for creativity. Whether it would count as user choice, however... Maybe if I opt not to remove and then try again I'll get a different ad in place of the "remove" button? Or is this the only sponsor the event organizer has lined up? If so, and the option is to go to the event or check out the Qbox player, I should take the latter. But will it show up in my activity feed? And if it did would my feed state that I'm going to the event and checking out the Qbox player?

Will users submit to advertising of this form? Methinks they'd rather resist!