Life Streams - Publish your Attention Data

April 27, 2007 in Web by Carsten Pötter | 3 comments

On Tuesday 30 Boxes announced that life streams have been added to user accounts, offering another feature to the service’s approach on social identity.

Basically a life stream is a timeline of your online activity. I first read about it on Jeremy Keith’s blog back in November. He realised that most data people publish on the web is time stamped: blog posts, Twitter messages -> attention data. Of course, it is a tantalising idea to make those timelines available and display them on the web.
Other people like Sam Sethi, Stowe Boyd, and Emily Chang had similar thoughts about publishing their attention data, so it is no surprise that there are companies offering life streams now; even WordPress plugins are availabe already.

I still have mixed feelings about life streams because much more information is revealed about myself than just posting short blurbs on Twitter or publishing my whereabouts on Plazes. There is a time stamp on all those postings and it was very easy to track my daily life. On the other hand it is probably the logical consequence of profile aggregation which I like a lot.

If you think life streams are right up your alley I recommend checking out these tools:

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  1. Jon’s avatar

    Jon on April 28, 2007 at 17:38

    “I still have mixed feelings about life streams because much more information is revealed about myself …”

    Your feelings are completely justified, and privacy concerns are certainly valid. However, many publishers of lifestream data allow you to privatize your data, so only those who you choose to make it available to can access it.

    So if you consider lifestreams in the context of who will make use of it; ie: probably just your friends and family - the benefits of such services certainly outweigh most concerns.

    Services like Cluztr, also allow you to manage your data, in so much as deleting those items which are, either irrelevant or inappropriate. Additionally, they provide many other methods for distilling and filtering data - so by the time the stream hits your reader or aggregator it’s nice and clean.

  2. Carsten Pötter’s avatar

    Carsten Pötter on April 28, 2007 at 18:36

    I will certainly have a closer look at Cluztr and iStalkr (and any other service I find) and see how I can use my attention data with those services. The life stream idea is too fascinating to not check it out. :)