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Lifestream – Centralize Your Online Presences

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I’ve been watching with interest how Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion has been using an online feed aggregator called, Tumblr, which has created a unified place for all of Steve’s feeds (or the content that he creates online). You can see his latest Blog postings, twitter, flickr and other updates all in one place, and they are viewable by the last item he has posted. You can even subscribe to this one feed to get everything. He Blogged about it over here: Identity Through Online Lifestreams.

I started my own Lifestream around the same time I saw Steve’s post. You can see it here: Mitch Joel Lifestream.

I’ve managed to fill my Lifestream with Six Pixels of Separation, twitter, del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr and my shared items in Google Reader.

It’s just “there” and I have not done much else with it, other than wonder if something like Tumblr will have any serious uptake as a Marketing and Communications channel.

There are two trains of thought at work here:

1. There are people who just want a feed. They just want to know what’s been updated and when. They’re what I call, the Dragnets. You know, “just the facts.”

2. There are people who want the full experience. They like jumping from site to site, clicking around and experiencing everything in all of its glory. Google Reader is probably not all that appealing to them. They’re what I call, the Aeromsiths. You know, “sweet emotion.”

I know that having a unified feed of all of the content that I am creating online will have its place. As online social networks continue to grow (and as newer ones come into play), individuals will always struggle with how to stay on top of what the people in their social graph are up to.

So, here’s the big Marketing question: now that I have a Lifestream, will it be used (or not) by the Dragnets or the Aerosmiths?

I have yet to truly embrace the idea of Lifestreams as I seem to be a halfie: I like both being notified when a channel has been updated via Google Reader, and I also enjoy hopping over to the actual environment to catch up and really feel the full experience.

For now, I grabbed a Lifestream to have one, test it out and discover if there is (or will be) a Marketing opportunity for these in the coming months and years.

I can see this type of concept really picking up steam as people get overwhelmed with the multitudes of content that any individual can create. Something is going to give and having one, in a centralized location, is a smart move. Even though, I have no immediate plans for the Mitch Joel Lifestream, it just “is” right now… and that’s fine too. It only took a couple of minutes to set-up and it is fully automated.

You can create you own Lifestream over here: Tumblr.

7 comments

  1. I’ve had a Tumblr account for a while. Not to put too fine a point on it, it sucks. All but two of the feeds I’ve added don’t work — whenever I check, it tells me there was a problem importing the feeds — all of which work fine elsewhere, and some are just my account information as required in the Tumblr feed submission form. I’ve contacted support and had no reply. As far as I’m concerned, this is still a wide-open space for somebody to enter with a product that actually works.

  2. I just started using Tumblr and my verdict is still out, I’m willing to experiment a bit because I love the concept of one aggregated location for all my various online additions.
    Personally, I’m calling it my “digital stream” as I don’t feel that what I do online constitutes my “life”; it’s a portion of it, but not the whole.

  4. Leona Hobbs has been praising the virtues of Tumblr on her Tumbleona blog for a while now. I finally set up my page. It took me all of two minutes. I couldn’t believe how fast and easy it was to get started.
    I’m still figuring out how I’m going to make it work for me. Perhaps it will become the perfect spot for me to integrate Bargainista with my other interests.

  5. So, it seems like my thoughts on not being 100% either way on Lifestreams runs true.
    Shel – I can’t say that I’ve had a similar incident: it took me a couple of seconds to copy and paste my feeds in and boom… it worked.
    Tamera – I like that term, “digital stream.” As for comments, I’m still “moderating” them. All this means is that I hit the publish button. It’s more because of the spam than anything else.

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