the Onda

ReadWriteWeb has an astonishing roundup of the multitude of sites playing in the "stream your life" space— a category which essentially amounts to rolling the feeds from the various different sites you participate into one activity stream that your friends can then use to keep tabs on you. Since this is a specialized feed reader application, and since I've had feed readers on the brain lately, I spent some time checking a few of the services.

My conclusion: I remain unconvinced that these services can exist as standalone destinations, though I now see an important task they fulfill that a more general purpose feed reader (a la Google Reader) does not. The best of them provide a nice feature in managing distributed identity across a whole variety of sites. FriendFeed does this the best; you subscribe to individual people and then get all of their various different activities in one stream. Where this comes in most helpful is with people who have blogs but who also do a lot of twittering, flickering, and deliciousing (though it bears mention that in some cases those other activities are of a completely different modality). I realize that this seems like a sort of trivial feature that could easily be added on to a mainstream blogging engine (and probably should), but it is worth pointing out nonetheless.

Where I'm fairly sure these sites are not going to win is in providing yet another way to author a similar but distinct type of micro content. Back to FriendFeed for a moment: outside of aggregating my own content, I can also write quick posts (a la Tumblr) that live only inside of my FriendFeed feed for my FriendFeed friends to look at. Do we really need this in the age of blogger and Wordpress and Twitter and a whole bunch of other very similar content creation engines?

What I'd prefer to see is the folks from the 35 different startups profiled here picking up a copy of "Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran— O'Reilly's wonderful new book on the data processing algorithms that will power the next wave of social computing. It's taken me more than 10 years to get a much more superficial understanding of some of the core filtering, grouping, indexing, and ranking algorithms that Segaran covers with an extremely lucid style and concrete code samples in this book. More importantly however, this is the kind of experimentation we should be doing, instead of having people just jamming Wordpress and Twitter or Jaiku and Flickr in the transporter and hoping that what comes out the other end doesn't have a fly's head.

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