The Word 'Lifestream' is Singular

The world is moving rapidly. The way we are communicating is changing, and the second I press 'publish' on this, the first of my long-form blog posts, it will be out of date. It's an exciting time to be in the field of web marketing because it gives me a front row seat to the evolution of human communication and a world shrinking faster than we can comprehend.

So it's not surprising to me that the vlog entry I posted just ten short months ago, "Social Media Breakfast," is already in desperate need of an update. The video is all about the concept of lifestreaming, though ironically, the term doesn't appear anywhere in the video.

In it, I talk about what I saw as a problem with the current state of social media. That by broadcasting your status updates (and other content) via multiple services, you have essentially saved the same piece of data in multiple locations. Any developer will tell you this is a huge no-no in database architecture, and it's no less of a problem in social media.



Let's look at a concrete example of this problem. When this blog post is complete, its title and a link to its page on carousel30.com will be posted on Twitter and Facebook. Let's say a reader, "John," sees it in his Facebook News Feed and clicks the link. He reads the post, and decides to comment by logging in at the bottom of the page using Facebook connect. Fantastic.

But then! Reader "Jane" sees the post on Twitter, and chooses to leave her comment via an @carousel30 reply. It just so happens that Jane's comment was exactly the sort of thing John would have loved. In fact, if he'd seen it, he would have been inspired to write a novel, which a young man would one day read, and would in turn inspire him to ultimately bring about world peace. What? Am I the only one who liked "Lady In The Water?"

Perhaps my example is a little...dramatic. But it illustrates the point. The concept of a lifestream should be a singular one, but currently we are only approximating a singular existence with multiple "twin" posts. Twitter users can tap into my lifestream using Twitter, Facebook users with Facebook, and so on, but when each group has their own set of comments, that's when things get messy.

At the end of the video, I had no answers to this problem. But today, on this very post, part of the problem has been overcome. From our example earlier, John posted his comment by logging in with Facebook Connect. This allows the comment to "live" on the blog page whether it's left by Twitter or Facebook--but there's currently nothing stopping anyone from doing as Jane did in the example, posting an @carousel30 reply without using the interface at the bottom of the post that would tie her reply to the blog page.



What we're left with now is a system that makes it harder to follow the thread of communication, not easier. But what I have is a theory of what the answer to all this may be.

What I believe may happen in years to come is that each of these types of posts we make: videos, images, 140-character status updates, and blog posts such as this, will all become a protocol, like email, instant message, or RSS that anyone can tap into, using any social media site that conforms to a set of protocols. A status message posted from Facebook will show up for Twitter users, not because a twin post has been created on Twitter, but because they are each displaying a single node--just in different ways.

Specialized innovations and niche audiences are what the internet is all about--but the fact that a user must resort to posting an image on one site, and duplicate that post for their Facebook gallery, and their Flickr gallery is a sign that social media is still very much the wild, wild West. The variation of sites people use to lifestream, and follow others, shouldn't go away. Specialized sites like DeviantArt, a social media site for artists, would still have their place--but they would each exist as a lens through which to view a lifestream.

Far fetched? Perhaps, but consider the evolution of instant messengers, I can't remember the last time I had to ask "what messenger do you use?". For the last couple years I've been completely unaware of what messengers people are using except (sometimes) at the moment of first adding them to my buddy list. I chat using iChat or Adium seamlessly with my colleagues whether their account is registered with AIM, Mac, or Google--and regardless of what program provides their interface.

Let's consider what Google is doing.  Some users will obviously see Buzz and think "oh no, another site to update", but I think Google is a good candidate to bring it all together.

If anything like what I'm describing were to come to pass, we'd need some way of standardizing our posts so that each site could display a lifestream no matter how it was created.  And more importantly, pull in the comments to that post, no matter where they came from.  We would need to use highly flexible nodes of communication that you could customize to different sites and different uses...  hey, are you thinking what I'm thinking?  Waves.

Not only do Waves do everything these lifestream posts would need to do, but the best part is the API is open for anyone to make their own custom user interface.  As I understand it, there isn't any functionality in Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, or YouTube that couldn't be accomplished via a custom Wave UI.

Now let's run through John and Jane's interaction again, this time, everything's Waves.  John posts a comment to this post (which is a Wave on our site), John sees it in his Facebook news feed.  Whether he chooses to comment on the news feed announcement, or the blog page itself, his comment will be in the same thread.

Now here's where things get tricky.  Jane sees it on Twitter.  She clicks the link and reads the post.  Obviously if she creates her tweet on the blog page itself it will show up in the conversation thread (we've already got that working!) But what if she goes back to twitter, clicks on the tweet to an @carousel30 reply?  Well, remember, in this hypothetical situation Twitter itself is a custom Wave reader, and the Tweet is just a tweet-like representation of the Wave.  So anything that she says by clicking that post will show up under it as a comment, whether you view it on Facebook, Buzz, or the blog page itself!

Is this the future?  Will Google guide social media out of the Wild West and into a standardized way of sharing our work, our lives and our creativity?  Well, one thing's for sure, it won't work exactly like I've described, but something's got to change and I can't wait to see what's next.