Lifestreaming

The term lifestream was coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter at Yale University in the mid-1990s to describe "...a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream. The tail of your stream contains documents from the past (starting with your electronic birth certificate). Moving away from the tail and toward the present, your stream contains more recent documents --- papers in progress or new electronic mail; other documents (pictures, correspondence, bills, movies, voice mail, software) are stored in between. Moving beyond the present and into the future, the stream contains documents you will need: reminders, calendar items, to-do lists."

Lifestreams are also referred to as social activity streams or social streams.

On the web

Social network aggregators such as Collectedin, sweetcron and Lifestream, a plugin for the popular blogging and CMS platform, Wordpress, adapt Freeman and Gelernter's original concept to address the vast flows of personal information and exchange created by social network services such as MySpace or Facebook ("Web companies large and small are embracing this stream" of providing lifestreaming). Other online applications have emerged to facilitate a user's lifestream. Posterous offers a variety of unique features to enhance its basic blogging function. Tumblr is a similar concept, but with slightly different features.

Lifestreams also represent a source of information about people's intents that can be mined.

See also

• Digital traces
• Federated identity
• Activity stream
• The Final Cut (2004 film), a movie about ethical challenges related to lifestreams and editing them

List of Lifestreaming Services

• Catch Mobile lifestreaming service
• Collectedin lifestreaming service with a well constructed microblogging and bookmarking community
• Facebook Social Networking portal
• iTVmediaPlayer live and on-demand TV portal
• Twitter SMS-like lifestreaming service
• Orkut Social networking portal
• AIM Lifestream Social Networking portal and aggregator.
• Flavors.me Social media aggregator that includes support for RSS.
• Chi.mp Lifestreaming and personal domain service
• FriendFeed Lifestreaming service
• Google Buzz Lifestreaming service embedded in Gmail
• Tumblr Lifestreaming service
• iminta Lifestreaming service
• Sweetcron Self-hosted lifestreaming solution
• favit.com Lifestreaming service with RSS reader
• yiid.com personalized lifestreaming service
• Posterous Lifestreaming service
• Alternion Social aggregation service