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Thursday
Aug272009
Lifestreaming: Evolving the Model from Import and Aggregate to Hub and Spokes
Young Urban ProfessionalLifestreaming started out initially as a model that revolved around importation and aggregation: a place to roll-up all your streams. But that's changing.
Now that Facebook acquired Friendfeed and the noise on Twitter is at near cacophonous levels, I am seeing a new model emerge for lifestreaming. This one centers on using a site as your hub, having it syndicate out to all your spokes (where you engage around it) and then bringing some of the conversation back to your site. It also seems to help people focus their content in more useful ways.
Mark Krynsky, who I had a chance to meet in LA last week at XPrize, summarizes this shift for lifestreaming nicely in this post. Here's how he diagrammed it...
And this closely mirrors what others, like our creative director Jared Hendler, Fast Company and others have observed about Posterous.
Facebook, Twitter and RSS all have a big problem - too much noise, not enough signal. This new approach for lifestreaming, however, coupled with Posterous' outstanding reader (depicted below) is forcing me to make smart choices about who I follow. I am finding myself turning more to the Posterous community for cool stuff since, they too, seem to recognize that too much nose is bad, signal is good.
Maybe I am crazy, but I think the simplicity of the Posterous platform - which helps us get closer to signals and away from noise - will be the next site to capture the hearts and minds of the digerati, particularly as they tire of the noise.
Reader Comments (26)
the addition of Disqus would pull in comments from other sites as well as push content out. Push is good, pull is also good..
Brent, indeed. That's the true model for syndication and aggregation of conversations related to social objects. Steve, get job!
Yep absolutely. Hub and spoke all the way. What would be nice is to present different summaries depending on the outlet. Also, is there a way to send photos to Posterous but *not* to Flickr? When I'm using the bookmarklet it automatically sends ...
@Tony you don't get as many options on bookmarklet as email at moment. Bookmarklet is either autopost everywhere or nowhere. Email has the flexibility with the different address combinations. Admin (Sachin I think) said bookmarklet improvements in works....
You're so right about the self-imposed moratorium on noise. Having been here over a year, there are very few times I can remember being besieged by an onslaught that is common in similar communities.And as much as I see people prompting "When are you going to have themes?", while I'd love them, I'm just fine without. The rest (as they say) is gravy.
I think this automated response - or autopost - simply adds to everybody's noise
Totally sold on the Hub and Spoke concept and had been trying to implement it for the past year, using Hubs: my self-hosted Blog, Ping.fm, Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Google Reader, Disqus and Backtype.Although, not sure I agree that Posterous is the ideal Hub. I use the above Hubs to populate my Spokes: Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, BrightKite, Plurk, Laconi.ca, Identi.ca, Bebo, Flickr, Posterous, Linkedin and LastFM.The reason for the multiple Hubs is the same reason other commenters mentioned of the ability for these Hubs to control which Spokes the content posted should be directed to.Ping.fm is the closes one that does this but still not robust enough compared to the other Hubs I use above.
I like posterous because of the possibility of posting via email. For me, it might become a necessity once I'm inside Myanmar (Burma) I need to be able to have some form of access to the outside world when all other sites are down/blocked. At the same time, I'm not willing to give up the platform we're on which is Wordpress (they have an option for email posts, but I don't know how reliable or technical I need to be to set it up).In terms of managing noise, you really need different profiles for different things. That'll also keep your message on target, while you need different formats of the same message for different audiences.
I love Posterous, and I think the hub and spoke model may be the best way to stay connected to all of my different online social "spaces" - today. But that is more because it lets me maintain my presence in each of them with less overall effort. But it doesn't really help me aggregate or visit each of these neighborhoods. I am still looking for a good solution there, as the models evolve. http://blog.niccllc.net/lifestreaming-does-hub-and-spokes-work
Disclaimer of bias: I'm the founder and CEO of Postling.com.I like the Hub and Spoke model generally (Postling is this way), but I think there are some critical details.1. Your participation in various communities must be authentic. Your community can quickly and easily tell you are auto-posting, and if you don't spend the time to log in and engage with that community specifically, you'll be cast out. Unless you're a celebrity :)2. You participate in each community for slightly different reasons (otherwise, why are you there?). Some are about tech, some about photography, or food, or sports. So if you are auto-posting tech posts to your food community, you've failed to be authentic (see #1).3. This also is true for twitter / facebook status updates. If your updates are nothing more than the first 100 chars of your blog post and a bit.ly link, your audience will notice (again, see #1).When we designed Postling, we built this in. Matching my points above with features below:1. We aggregate all comments into one place, so you can engage your commenters on the right platform. We currently support Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Squarespace, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Sorry, no Disqus (yet) because their API doesn't quite let us do what we need it to do. 2. With Postling, you choose which blogs you want to post to. Sometimes a post is only appropriate for your personal blog. Others are for both your professional and your personal blog. You have control.3. Once you make a post, you can customize the facebook and twitter status update that announces your latest post.Anyway, just some thoughts on community building vs. hub and spoke auto-posting. Thanks for the great blog, Steve, I've been a long time reader.
Good point David! On the other hand: my customers for themselves use only one or two channels. One is on facebook, the other more on twitter. But they all like to be informed about new postings, things happening and so on. so I think, the posterous model isn't too bad. Big issue: more noise. But isn't that what happens all the time allover? Filtering and aggregation of relevant channels seems important to me.
Hey Steve, thanks for referencing my diagram. I want to clarify that my post was to show the difference between the two methods but I wasn't advocating a shift which is what the sentence before my diagram may have suggested.Choosing one method over the other is strictly dependent on what individual users are trying to accomplish and I see both continuing and flourishing. While the ability for Posterous to offer a post once / publish everywhere metaphor is great, some may find the current suite of tools and supported services limiting.I feel that there can still be ways to incorporate aggregation from external services effectively that open up ways to increase the quantity and quality of content to be shared. I feel that whether you are publishing outwardly from your hub or importing inwardly, either can effectively provide the same result.
David has it right. I've been on posterous for about 5 months, it's a random post-it board for me. Tumblr, strictly fixed gears and bike culture, Twitter and my blog for the most part tech and new media. In terms of my "online activity" (lifestreaming is just a silly tag to be sold on Amazon) I could not find two more diametrically opposed passions in life. Again, speaking strictly in terms of online communities, they don't mix. If I were to start feeding blog posts about NPR's API and Daniel Jacobson's PPT to my Tumblr account or elsewhere, as much as it interests me, it wouldn't fit in the riding/bike culture community. Period. Offline it makes perfect sense since the context for understanding my interests (Peel Sessions in Brooklyn and NPR's API) exist first within a physical space then through a defined set of online communities.I experimented with all sorts of syndication models FB-FF-Posterous-Tumblr-Twitter-self hosted blog (by the way that wall diagram doesn't makes sense the self hosted blog is not a dead end wall); one syndication model does not service how I focus my interests online. That brings me to "lifestreaming". Outside of this silo (and this blog does exist within a tech/marketing silo) people talk about their kids, grocery shopping, fashion, pop culture, laundry, politics, religion, art, food, tech, vacations, relationships etc… "Lifestreaming" is mix of everything, the focus being on the individual and his/her relationship with family, friends, and like online communities. That's precisely where the signal begins and the noise ends. Most "lifestreams” on Posterous and Tumblr as I see them in practice are not nearly as focused as Micro Persuasion II on Posterous. And therefore, more noise than signal, regardless of the platform. That brings me to my question, to an outside audience, without the personal/physical relationship that shapes the meaning and context of a signal, how is Posterous or any other distribution service/model NOT pure syndicated noise?
What David Lifson said ... especially his first point. All this autoposting is disingenuous
Thanks. I do think it's an important point, and I think people's patience with auto-blasting content will wane very quickly in this information overloaded world of ours.
Thanks, Ben.I think blogging communities like Tumblr do allow for very personal relationships. I know more about some of my Tumblr "friends" than I do about people I see in real life.
Yes, certainly. People, in the face of auto-blasting, will look for filtering methods (think back to Clay Shirky's talk at Web 2.0 Expo last year). The filtering method you - the content creator - hope they won't use? Unfollowing you. And yet that is the easiest and most immediate method that will come to mind for them.
One of the best ways to spot a novice Tumblr user is if the person imports all the feeds they can and dumps it all into their stream. Everyone in the community can tell, gets annoyed, and tells the person to slow down, back off, and start participating with the community.There are contexts in which auto-import can be effective. For example, I was post a "photo of the day" to my flickr account and auto-import that to Tumblr. Since I would engage with people on Tumblr about the photo, the imported content was authentic and appropriate.My point is that I agree with you, Mark, and I think to ultimately be effective, there needs to be a human intelligence layer that acts upon imports and exports and decides if the context is appropriate.
This is a very interesting and helpful discussion. I agree with Dave Lifson and Ben Taylor's points.I like Posterous very much as a way to deliver content to various social sites.On the flip side, I have been trying to find a way to aggregate my online presence meaningfully. My blog is for work; my tumblog/posterous is fun stuff; Twitter and Facebook are some of each.I am now experimenting with an Arktan widget to put the lifestream stuff on my blog in a simple way.http://blog.jparkhill.com/lifestream/It's a little ugly right now; the widget looks better here.http://janyaa.org/onlineactivity.phpThe tools let me filter my own content and present it the way I want to. (I have no financial or other interest in Arktan; I just like the product).
Steve, are you planning to give us a 3 or 6 month review on how you think your move to Posterous has impacted your work? Would be interested in hearing about that...the pluses and minuses and how you think the switch is still yet to manifest itself on your future work. Thanks for the content...
@Judd I might three months in - which is later this month. - Steve
I've never thought about lifestreaming before but you make it sound very interesting. I agree that both Twitter and Facebook have too much noise but i think they are worth it in the long run. I think it will be interesting to see if people start lifestreaming.
great posting.....i loved it
Steve I think you are smack on here.In the last few days I have been experimenting with posterous and I think I am going to kill my blog.Lifestreaming is also a philosophy for life. Our lives begin in the world's stream, we dabble around a bit and contribute to the stream then we exit.Simplicity is becoming key in business and life (as pioneered by the likes of Leo Babauta). People will focus more on experiences and friendships than stuff in the near future.I think that lifestreaming has replaced blogging. Anything that can have a post more than 500 words in length would be better seen in a 3-5 minute video where the visual representation makes a higher impact.I'm now looking for ways to capitalise on these changes and to help pioneer new businesses from my Generation into using these channels to prosper at a much faster rate than any of it's competitors.
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