With the rise of Social Media, people now have several websites where they track their status and keep in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. Earlier this year saw the rise of the Lifestreams – web sites that serve to aggregate the inputs and outputs of a single person’s myriad social media sites. When I saw these sites begin to take hold, I’ll admit I wasn’t a believer. I watched the Instant Messenger Wars play out years ago, and I was skeptical that companies with established user bases would ever allow a 3rd party to have access to that userbase or the rich data that it held. This walled garden approach is what sunk ICQ. In short, I didn’t believe that social media or microblogging sites would ever have a truly open API.
Glad to say I was wrong on that one. The post children of the Web 2.0 craze are social media sites and their open APIs. For every micro-blogging site like Twitter, there is a 3rd party AIR app like Twhirl that is built on its API. There are applications like Digsby that are mashups of “old” IM and “new” social media. And now there are Lifestreams – services that are successfully built around the goal of aggregating the streams of information from all these social media sites into one simplified view.
The king of the hill in the Lifestream community is FriendFeed, which launched privately in 2007 and opened a public beta in Feb 08 with a $5 million Series A funding. FriendFeed was covered mightily by the l33t bloggers at TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb. At first, I thought it was mostly because it was more because of the founding team of 4 ex-Google execs. I suppose that’s with good cause. There’s a fraternity of ex-Google employees that have gone on to fortune and glory. Sergey & Larry and Google are the 2000′s version of Jack Welch and General Electric.
The speed with which FriendFeed integrated profiles, statuses, and all other rss feeds it could lay its hands on changed my opinion of the service. Their product development methodology firmly guided by their Google background, FriendFeed put together a very simple design and then focused entirely on the product functionality itself. FriendFeed quickly added the most popular services in the all the major categories – microblogging, video blogging, photos, status, news, and music. They cleverly added RSS feeds from sites that you wouldn’t think of as 2.0 – Amazon’s Wishlist and Netflix’s favorites. That’s a mashup of sorts. In early 2008, FriendFeed had clearly focused on the aggregation of services, ballooning to 43 services at the time of this writing. Functionality exists to post to the aggregated Lifestream through a simple “Comment” feature, but in my opinion that’s not a useful service. Here’s why – if your friend uses Pownce for micro-blogging and you comment on that post in FriendFeed, your comment doesn’t become a Pownce update. After some pressure, FriendFeed did add an option to make FriendFeed comments become tweets, but that’s the limit of integration with other services from an update perspective. Recent feature additions include the concept of “rooms” and the integration of FriendFeed comments as part of blog comments. Like their chatroom namesakes before them, FriendFeed Rooms are essentially a group of people discussing a specific topic – using FriendFeed comments of course. The blog comment mechanism came to be as plug-ins for WordPress and Movable Type, where you can see FriendFeed discussions as part of your blog commentary.
Upstart SocialThing! launched in beta after securing $300k in “early stage” funding in the Fall of 2007. From the start, SocialThing! has attempted to avoid direct competition with the larger and more popular FriendFeed by claiming that they’re a different breed of Lifestream that’s not competitive at all. There’s a lot of truth to that. Where FriendFeed focused on pulling together all the RSS it could lay its hands on, SocialThing has focused on 2 way integration with the services it supports. SocialThing’s design more closely mimics others in the Web 2.0 space, which stands in contrast to FriendFeed’s mimimalistic user interface. FriendFeed comments require a FriendFeed reader (website or AIR app) to view. SocialThing caught on earlier about that major drawback. When you post a response to someone using SocialThing, it posts directly to the service, not to itself. Additionally, when you make changes to your profile or add/remove friends on other services, these changes automatically occur in your SocialThing account. This makes SocialThing more heavily reliant on 3rd party API, which is risky. But, the risk outweighs the benefits to AOL, who recently decided to acquire SocialThing earlier this August. AOL probably has desire to pair SocialThing with Meebo, a web-based IM client that it has a significant investment stake in.
In summary, the top 2 Lifestream services both offer RSS and social media stream aggregation. FriendFeed focuses on aggregating as many streams as it can, where SocialThing focuses on a more complete 2-way integration with each of the services it supports. With the acquisition by AOL, SocialThing’s product roadmap is in doubt. The future for FriendFeed seems focused on slowly turning the discussion from Tweets and Pownces to FriendFeed comments.
You can find me on FriendFeed and SocialThing. Add a comment below if you’d like an invite to the SocialThing beta. More importantly – I’d be interested to hear how you’re using either or both of this services.
