Well, it didn’t take long for people to realize that the benefit of bringing together every activity from your friends on the web in one place turns into a completely overwhelming information overload after the first excitement is over.
Steve Rubel already stated a while ago:
We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.
Caroline McCarthy on CNET puts it even more rude:
Technology blogs have been chirping enthusiastically about “lifestreaming” services like FriendFeed and Socialthing, which claim to provide an answer to growing complaints about “social-networking fatigue.”
But taking overkill and putting it all in one place doesn’t mean that it’s not overkill anymore. Consider it social-networking’s first identity crisis.
This is exactly what we’ve realized from the feedback of our first beta testers at lifestrea.ms. This is even more true in the case of lifestrea.ms, because we allow you to read any kind of feed (news feeds, calendar feeds, etc.), which brings together much more information than what competing services are able to gather.
And this also was the reason why we stepped back to think again and develop some new and exciting technologies that help people to get rid of information overload rather than overwhelming them.
Bare with us for a couple of days more and you’ll be rewarded with the new lifestrea.ms beta 2, enhanced with recommendation technologies and artificial intelligence algorithms that learn from what you do, what you like and even what you’re not interested in.
We hope that Josh Catone from ReadWriteWeb is right when he sums up his article on ‘The Lifestreaming Backslash‘ with the words…
However, dealing with information overload is clearly a problem that these services will need to figure out how to address — whichever does it best will likely be a big winner.
]]>SIME Innovation Day 2008
representing lifestrea.ms as an innovation award nominee
Stockholm / Sweden / Feb 7 2008
Ecomm 2008 Conference „Talk Lifestreaming“
Computer History Museum / Silicon Valley / USA / Mar 14-16 2008
2nd European Identity Conference „User Centric Mastermind Panel“
Deutsches Museum / Munich / Germany / Apr 22-25 2008
If you would like to meet Thomas Huhn (founder of lifestrea.ms) at one of these events, just send an email to thomas \ AT \ lifestrea.ms
]]>So, this is your thread, give us your comments, your feedback, your feature wishlist and whatever you like. To prevent spam, comments are moderated, so please be patient after posting your thoughts.
]]>Anyway the number of sites and applications that make use of this data is still restricted. Today we came over the german site wevent.org, which is a social event calendar utility, similar to the well known upcoming.org (but much more beautiful
).
If you register with wevent.org, you have - like with every new social network - the problem that you have to take your friends there to make most out of this application. The good message is that wevent has an hCard import which works very well with lifestrea.ms.
According to Dennis Bloete, one of the founders of wevent, they check pages for hCards and try to match fullnames and nicknames with what’s in their database. As most people use the same nick all the time this works pretty well.
Give it a try and please tell us if you know other sites with hCard or XFN import. We are more than happy to have them listed here!
]]>Please have a look at the following articles to get an impression how and what the first beta testers see in lifestrea.ms. If you’ve blogged about lifestrea.ms and you are not on the list, just drop us a note.
As a personal remark: If you’re stuck with some functionality inside of lifestrea.ms the awesome in depth review of Michael Pick and Robin Good on MasterNewMedia is a perfect FAQ!



We’ve send out only about 40 invitations so far, but the userbase is already 120 people.
The registered users have send out around 1100 more invitations to their friends and contacts.
The registered users read 3376 unique RSS feeds (that’s an average of 28 feeds per user) and have send 5748 internal messages so far.
lifestrea.ms seems to be highly viral and network effects are already getting visible in this early stage.
Thanks everybody for participating!
Btw: We’re gonna send out another bunch of invites later that day.Â
]]>The reason why we’re opening up the gates is that lifestrea.ms is already feature packed yet and we really have the problem to decide in which direction we should force future developments. The possibilities are almost endless and we need your support to focus on what makes most sense.
Feature Wishlist: which of the following features do you think of as most desirable?
Please feel free to add any additional features that come into your mind!
Roadmap: Independently from what’s said above, the following features are already on their way:
Known Bugs: there are also some issues we will fix during the next days
Anyway - we hope you have a lot of fun testing this new app. We appreciate your comments!
BTW: lifestrea.ms is a Montserat domain name and we’re really happy to have found this cool and generic name after all.
]]>After many years, in the middle of the Dot.com bubble we met again and noticed that we both were running small internet startups. We decided to share offices, but again, we were not joining forces to work on the same projects.
Some time later I bought a house and noticed - somehow astonished - that Stephan was living in the yellow house 30 meters away from our backdoor.
On a cold monday in december last year I decided to attend a Webmonday in Kaiserslautern and guess who was organizing the event? Stephan was not only the organizer, but I also learned that he was back in his job at the DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), working on exactly those topics that seemed most promising to me: semantics, artificial intelligence, mobile social apps…
We were having a couple of beers after the event and from there on we were talking on a regular basis on Web 2.0, startups and research.
Now tell me: How would you describe my relationship with Stephan in facebook? Or in any other social network that exists today? Impossible? I guess you’re right.
This real world example shows what we’re heading for with YoWhassup - to give people more expressive ways to picture their relationships. But - and here’s the point - without loosing the formality that enables YW to bring people together on the right level.
Our solution is to follow the XFN standard and fully implement it in a social network - I guess even for the first time. As a result I can describe my relationship with Stephan as
On top I can not only share friends with friends and neighbours with neighbours, but I can decide to tell everybody that we’re friends, but tell only my co-workers that Stephan is a colleague and keep the secret that we’re neighbours (well, not really by publishing this
).
This is a whole new granularity in describing your relationships which solves a lot of problems. E.G. I’ve been asked many times (and a lot of people think the same) “Why should I put my contacts visibly on XING or LinkedIn? My contacts are my most valueable asset!”.
With YW you can decide who has access to your contacts - the public, a distinct group of people or only you yourself.
Another incidental feature of the way we implemented our social graph is that relations are always two-way confirmed: If you add your son in your family network tagged with “child”, he will appear in your contacts list as “pending” as long as he does not confirm that relation. As soon as he does, you will also appear in his contacts tagged with “parent“. If he changes the relation tag, you will have to re-confirm… or think about what went wrong with your family
Development has been much more effort than we expected and there have (like always) been so many new ideas along the way that we just couldn’t resist to implement one or the other feature more than planned.
For all those patient friends of us waiting in a row: We’ve finally decided to give away another goody - those that get an invitation in our first round will not have to expect to be limited on the people they would like to invite. We think that it doesn’t make any sense or fun to use lifestrea.ms not the way it is intended to be by restricting youself to communicating only with 5 or 6 close friends or colleagues.
lifestrea.ms is all about real friends, real contacts, real people - so c’mon, invite your family, your former classmates that you want to keep in touch with, your neighbours, the people you met during holiday. Just mirror your real life and start keeping in the loop effortlessly!
I’m looking forward to see you in lifestrea.ms!
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