Lifestrea.ms Blog

I have followed the recent hype around lifestreaming and especially friendfeed.com and socialthing.com with a lot of interest, but pretty quiet, biting my lips to stop myself from giving any comments. I didn’t feel like it was my task to educate people about what’s lacking from these massively promoted apps.

Well, it didn’t take long for people to realize that the benefit of bringing together every activity from your friends on the web in one place turns into a completely overwhelming information overload after the first excitement is over.

Steve Rubel already stated a while ago:

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.

Caroline McCarthy on CNET puts it even more rude:

Technology blogs have been chirping enthusiastically about “lifestreaming” services like FriendFeed and Socialthing, which claim to provide an answer to growing complaints about “social-networking fatigue.”
But taking overkill and putting it all in one place doesn’t mean that it’s not overkill anymore. Consider it social-networking’s first identity crisis.

This is exactly what we’ve realized from the feedback of our first beta testers at lifestrea.ms. This is even more true in the case of lifestrea.ms, because we allow you to read any kind of feed (news feeds, calendar feeds, etc.), which brings together much more information than what competing services are able to gather.

And this also was the reason why we stepped back to think again and develop some new and exciting technologies that help people to get rid of information overload rather than overwhelming them.

Bare with us for a couple of days more and you’ll be rewarded with the new lifestrea.ms beta 2, enhanced with recommendation technologies and artificial intelligence algorithms that learn from what you do, what you like and even what you’re not interested in.

We hope that Josh Catone from ReadWriteWeb is right when he sums up his article on ‘The Lifestreaming Backslash‘ with the words…

However, dealing with information overload is clearly a problem that these services will need to figure out how to address — whichever does it best will likely be a big winner.