If you define life streaming as a way to constantly communicate your activies using the internet then we need to start thinking more boradly than simply blogging (in all it’s various forms).
One possible consideration could be loosely-termed “geostreaming” - the ability with today’s modern technology to communicate not just what you’re doing but also where you are.
And Google’s recently-released free tool called [link!]Latitude is a perfect example of just such a technology.
Google Latitude is a small application that you download onto your cell phone and then allows your friends to see where you are at any point in time - either online or on their own cell phone - using Google Maps as a reference.
Fortunately, for those with privacy concerns, you are in complete control of who sees your feed. Unlike a blog where it is very difficult to block viewers, or Twitter where it is possible but rather frustratingly slow, with Latitude it couldn’t be much simpler. You decide exactly who can access that information and can change it at any point in time.
So why not take your life streaming to the next stage and get geostreaming too ![]()
One of the reasons that Twitter has become so popular is that it is so useful from a networking perspective. For this reason it tends to still be more popular in business and tech circles than, say, Facebook but there are still plenty of people simply using it for fun.
The thing is though that Twitter is great for helping you network with people who hang out in similar places to you - the same forums or social netowkring sites - but it can be harder to find people in your local area who share your interests.
I recently decided I’d like to challenge this and find out if there was a way that I could find people in my local area who shared my interests - web 2.0, web design and so on.
Luckily I stumbled across a really useful tool in my research - called NearbyTweets.com - in which you enter your location and some keywords to search for and then it brings up recent tweets from people that match your specifications.
Amazingly enough, bearing in mind what a small town I live in, I found two like-minded individuals already who I have now connected with - and I even found the local bus company are using Twitter to let customers know where they are on their route!
NearbyTweets is a really nifty service for meeting like-minded individuals and I strongly recommend you try it out for yourself today.
If you are Twittering for business, rather than friends, one of the keys to success is getting as many people as possible following you who are interested in the product or service you are offering.
But generating Twitter folloers can be a real challenge. Sure, there are the old classics but what if you’re not seeing the results you’d like to from your Twittering?
Not os long ago I ran a contest on one of my other blogs and saw my site flooded with visitors over the next few weeks. A large number ended up subscribing to my RSS feed and have become regular readers since then. The new blog literally went from nowhere to hundreds of subscribers in weeks.
In this way I know that contests can be one of the most powerful ways to grow your blog readerhsip - so why shouldn’t it work for Twitter?
Indeed, a few high-profile bloggers like ShoeMoney have been using this very technique to grow their Twitter followers.
The downside of such an activity is that in the past you needed to do a lot of manual work to make the contest run smoothly (and ensure the winners get their prizes awarded to them efficiently and fairly). But now a new service has been released that automates the process of a Twitter contest.
Entitled Twivaway (a clever play on words, I though!), this exciting new tools makes it super-simple to run a contest like this.
An example might be that you could create a free ebook or report that is available free to your Twitter followers. You could set up the Twiveaway system in such a way that whenever someone new joins you, they get access automatically to this report. Or perhaps you could ask them to tweet about it, and then they get it free.
Whatever you’d like to do, your Twitter followers win because they get a free gift and you get more followers so everyone wins.
Life streaming is such a new and exciting phenomenon it can be tempting to just jump straight in and start streaming. But I think this may be a mistake.
Before you set up your various profiles and get started, I think it’s important to consider who your target audience is and what you are hoping to achieve via your life streaming.
As an example, if you were looking to attract professional web design clients your life streaming would likely be considerably different to if you just wanted to stay in contact with your family while away travelling.
The end result will likely affect not just what you say, but also the mediums you use. Uploading pictures to Twitter or Faceboom might be ideal if you are looking to communicate with your friends, though you might want to upload them to Flickr or to your website directly if you are looking to touch base with professional clients.
Indeed, even your user names may be affected by this decision. For example if you are life streaming for business, should you use your own personal name or your business name on Twitter?
So focus on your target market and try ot make some decisions about what will help you achieve your end goal. Will they appreciate spam? Should you stream your work or personal life? What *shouldn’t* you talk about (religion, politics etc.).
Once you have a general idea of your life streaming persona, next think about the most appropriate services to touch the people you want to connect with (Twitter seems to suit everyone though!).
And only then when you’re fully prepared should you actually start your life streaming experiment.
FriendFeed is one of the newer micro-blogging, social networking sites that is focused on sharing the things you like with the people you like. In most cases, it is used as a way to share videos or music, but it also used to share websites among friends.
The goal of FriendFeed is for people to make better use of the web by sharing your favorites with people you already know. Social networking sites such as MySpace or Google are more concentrated on finding new people to join your network. FriendFeed assumes you already have a network of friends in place.
In addition to sharing what you have found on the web with your friends, you can see what your friends are up to and what they are looking at. For example, if a friend has recently bookmarked a YouTube.com video, you can link directly to that video. If your friend has found an interesting audio clip or photograph somewhere online, you will have access to that media.
Once you have bookmarked your media, you can discuss it amongst your friends. This is where website sharing comes in. If you find a website that you love and think your friends will enjoy, bookmark that site. Then, you and your friends can discuss its content, its relevance to your lives, and maybe go surfing for more websites like it. There is no end to the depth of discussions you can have with FriendFeed.
FriendFeed keeps track of all of your online activity and creates a database based on that activity. By crawling through the sites you have found, it finds others that might be of interest to you (much like Tivo does with television programming), and alerts you to those. By visiting a website or two, FriendFeed gets an idea of what you are interested in, and keeps track of your online movements. It then alerts your friends to what you are doing and where you are going.
In addition to helping you and your friends find some of the best websites online, FriendFeed helps you find videos and music that you might love, as well as put you in touch with people who are in a similar mind to you. All of this information is based on your surfing habits – where you go and what you do there.
Of course, there are some thing you might not want your friends to know about – so be careful where you search!
Blogging, a term derived from the word “blog”, which is a contraction of “web log”, has been in existence since the mid-1990s, but only now is it a popular form of media. This type of online diary or soap box is used by everyday people to vent, to tell others about their lives, or to attract attention or visitors to their site. The good news is that you don’t need your own website to have a blog – there are plenty of free blogging services now available.
One of the most popular free blogging services is Blogger.com. Owned by Google, Blogger allows you to create a free blog space and fill it with whatever you want. You can create a journal, add photos or video, add links or surveys, or create a bulletin board where people can leave you messages. Blogger is easy to use, you can update your blog from your cell phone, and offers free image and video hosting.
Blogspot.com is another free blogging service. Much like Blogger, Blogspot offers free media hosting and cell phone functionarlity. It is easy to use and, of course, free.
Most people who use blogs as a professional tool tend to use Wordpress.com. Wordpress has a free service, but its paid service is very popular among people who are using the web to make money.
One of the original free website companies, Homestead.com, now offers free blogging space, too. Homestead is aimed at the less technologically-savvy, so its functionality is somewhat limited, but it is free and easy to use.
An alternative to official blogging services is the very popular Myspace and Facebook. If you have a Myspace or Facebook page, you can use part of its functionality as a blog. There is a place on both pages to put up daily entries, add photos or videos, link to your favorite music or film clip, or invite others to add stuff, too.
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Twitter is one of the newest things on the web, a social networking tool that operates as both a standalone program as well as enabling further functionality to other social networking sites such as Facebook or Myspace. If you have ever received a “tweet”, then you know what Twitter is all about.
Part of the fun of having a social networking site is just working on it. People work on their sites, trying to outdo their friends, and turn it into a real hobby. Once you have signed on to Twitter, you will need to create a Profile page.
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If you think of social networking services and micro-blogging, no doubt Twitter comes to mind. It is the leader in this area, but it is not without competition. In fact, the competition is moving ahead of Twitter at a frightening pace.
Twitter serves a purpose and serves it well. You can deliver small (140 characters or less) messages to other social networking services or cell phones. You can massive amounts of people know about the minutiae of your day with the click of a button.
Some of Twitter’s competitors do much the same thing, but they all add a little extra. If you are looking only at micro-blog social networking services and forget about the many added benefits that Myspace, Friendster, or Facebook provide, Twitter has three main competitors: Identi.ca, Present.ly, and Friendfeed.
The most popular of the three is probably Friendfeed. Friendfeed does everything Twitter does, and then some. You can import and transmit videos, photographs, music, and blog information. You can create and transmit much larger messages – which is what most people really want to do. After all, there isn’t much you can say in 140 characters. Your profile page on Friendfeed is much more comprehensive than on Twitter, providing you ample opportunity to tell the world even more about YOU.
Identi.ca is much like Twitter, but it is better. Because it is an open source project, programmers around the world have enhanced it, tweaked it, and turned it into a better program. It works better than Twitter, is more stable, and has much more functionality. It is updated almost dynamically which means that new options are being built into the system as we speak.
Present.ly is also like Twitter, but its core audience is business. In other words, it is like Linkedin.com, but with a Twitter-type functionality. Present.ly allows people to create groups of business associates and send out messages to them. For business people, this is a more grown-up approach to micro-blogging.
In addition to these three, Jaiku, which is perhaps Twitter’s most formidable competitor, has recently been bought by Google. For Twitter, this could be bad news, since Google is expected to invest a considerable amount of money in the Jaiku technology and incorporate it into the Google suite of programs. Many Twitter users, though, feel Jaiku is an inferior product and will never take the place of their beloved program. Twitter users are fierce supporters of their product and rarely, if ever, support a rival one.What is the difference between Slimfast (Herbal Phentermine) and usual prescription Phentermine?
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Having recently given a talk on the demise of the dot.com era and the current economic situation, a question arose: “Can a company with no product, no money, and no purpose survive the recession?” In this case, the person was asking about Twitter, but the same question was asked about many dot.com companies in the late 90’s, and the answer is, “No, it will not survive.”
If you don’t know about Twitter.com, it is a social networking site that falls somewhere between a blog and a text message. Its messages are called “tweets” and they are short (140 characters or less) updates of what someone is doing at a particular time. For instance, if you click on “John McCain”, his latest tweet of six hours ago says that he “will speak on the floor momentarily.” Prior to that, he tells us to “Turn on CBS Evening News for my interview with Katie Couric.”
My friend Andrea’s tweet, on the other hand says that she is “enjoying a triple grande non-fat with whip mocha”. As you can see, the uses of tweets are many. Some important, some not so much. Jeff’s latest tweet is that he is “going home for the weekend”. I’m sure that everyone needed to know that!
So, how can a company that sends mass text messages about nonsense survive an economic downturn where unemployment is almost at 10% and hundreds of thousands of people are getting laid off each month? How can a company such as Twitter even justify occupying an office?
The answer is, of course, that it can’t. If you look back at the pre-dot.com bubble, there were plenty of “Twitter’s”. Companies that had little purpose, too many high-paid employees, no real product, and big initial public offering died. Yes, some people made off with a lot of money, but most people – the investors – lost it all. The small investors, people who couldn’t get a piece of the IPO pie were the ones who lost everything – the insiders made off with the money and dumped the non-existent product.
Twitter may survive in the sense that it will be bought out by a larger company – AOL, Myspace, Yahoo, Google – and be incorporated into another product. But, the long-term hopes of the viability of such a completely silly, useless product are dire. Would you invest your hard-earned money in a company that sends “tweets” about what people are drinking or eating or thinking? I wouldn’t!
If you don’t know what life streaming is, you haven’t been paying much attention to the web in the past year or so. More than just putting up a MySpace or Facebook page, life streaming is a means of telling the world virtually every movement you make on a day-to-day basis. If this sounds like a ridiculous notion, you may be right.
Imagine visiting a website that has every detail of a friend’s life. You may find entries such as, “I just woke up. I’m still tired.” Or, “Had cereal for breakfast.” That is the kind of content that life streams are made of. These are not in-depth, well-thought out observations about life, but the absolute trivial minutiae of a person’s life.
So, the question is, “Is life streaming just a short term fad?” Probably so. After all, there is no money to be made in it for the life streamer, so the assumption is that eventually they will get bored with typing in a sentence about every move they make. If they won’t make money doing it, they won’t continue doing it.
For the companies that run life streaming software, you have to question the business model. Why would anyone advertise on one person’s life stream that reaches, at most, only a handful of their friends. Unless you are someone famous, who could possibly have an interest in your life stream? Who would have any interest, whatsoever, in my life? Who cares that I stopped at Starbucks today? Who will really want to hear about my visit to the doctor’s next week? Probably no one – not even my mother.
I think life streaming is indeed a short term fad that will fade out when the current group of life streamers grows up and gets a life. A full life, with real friends and real activities, will replace hours of blogging. Imagine your own life – if you are out on a hike, having dinner with friends, working a full day, and going to the gym, do you really have the time to write about it every step of the day? Do you have the time to stop, pick up your phone, text a line about your current whereabouts, and send it off? And if you do, who the heck wants to read it? I surely don’t!
After all, if you have a real life, you are probably spending a lot less time on the computer, right? Life streaming will cease to exist when people get real lives.