Will businesses adopt lifestreams?
I maintain a couple of lifestreams, one at Tumblr and one at Jaiku. The Tumblr lifestream frustrates the hell out of me. I enter the URL of a perfectly valid feed, then check back to find a big red X and a note informing me that the feed could be found. Jaiku finds all the feeds without any trouble.
In case you haven’t heard of a lifestream or aren’t sure what they are, the concept is simple. The various places you maintain a social media footprint by and large all have RSS feeds associated with them. In a lifestream, you aggregate those feeds. People visiting the lifestream can see everything you have done on any of these properties—new blog posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, photos uploaded to Flickr, videos to YouTube, Twitter tweets, the list goes on.
It’s mildly surprising to me that businesses have not considered the equivalent of a lifestream. Company RSS feeds cover press releases and other news. Executives blog. Companies have figured out the value of contributing videos and photos to sharing sites. Some companies are even taking advantage of Twitter. A lifestream would combine every new action on any of these in a single river of company news. Anybody interesting in staying up-to-date on what a company is doing can subscribe to the lifestream feed. It could be a valuable resources to media and the investment community. It seems like a simple enough idea.
I could be wrong, of course; there could be companies already producing lifestreams. If not, though, I wonder which organization will be first.
01/21/08 | 6 Comments | Will businesses adopt lifestreams?