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!

• Read/WriteWeb: Lifestrea.ms Is Attempting to Build the Future of Life Online
  Marshall Kirkpatrick profiled Lifestrea.ms, a powerful new lifestreaming service from Germany that you’ll want to keep an eye on. Said Marshall: “It is a real testimony to the potential of the new web that anyone would even try to create something like this.”
• MasterNewmedia: Aggregate And Author All Your Social Media Content From One Place: Lifestrea.ms
  In short this makes for an incredibly open, flexible way to navigate your online news, status updates, media and relationships. And thanks to some smart privacy settings you can even create multiple profiles for different facets of your life, so that your boss, your friends and your grandma see a different stream of information about you according to your preferences…”
• lifestrea.ms - the next big thing ?
  Eine lifestream Bedieneroberflaeche mit einem smoothy Interface . Sicherlich kannte ich eine solche in Ansaetzen von yasni oder meinguter.name , aber lifestrea.ms is totally different -> feedreading, life-updates, 7 profiles for each part of your life, OpenID, APML etc. etc. Ich bin begeistert.
• Mykinda: Felii si fluxuri de viata digitala, in aceeasi pagina
  Identitatea 2.0 se masoara in fluxuri ale vietii personale si in felul in care controlam cantitatea de media (privata si publica) pe care o expunem (activ sau pasiv) in fata celorlalti. Daca la inceput ideea de site personal implica neaparat un webmaster si o lista destul de lunga de prioritati si de timpi morti pana cand puteai sa fii “online”", azi problema se pune altfel.
• Lifestrea.ms lanciato in Beta
  Avevo gia accennato al concetto di Lifestream e spero di tornare a parlarne presto. Questa mattina ricevo l’invito da un contatto recente, Thomas Huhn, responsabile di Solution Media, per provare il suo nuovo servizio: Lifestrea.ms. Si tratta di un servizio dove racchiudere i frammenti della propria identita online, attraverso l’aggregazione di tutti i flussi di informazione dei vari servizi.
• (Almost) nice Captcha
  Today, when registering on lifestrea.ms I stumbled upon the very first near-intelligent, almost unobstrusive, practically painless, captcha. What made it so? Beside being not too unreadable, it was simply validated real time via an Ajax server check, preventing an unwanted and frustrating form submission with incorrect field values. Why on Earth is this the first time I see something like this? I can swear I’m not going to fill any more form with a captcha that doesn’t comply to this real time validation principle.
• Attention, Graphs, and the Many Mes that Make my Self
  Your life stream reflects all the things that you’re interested in — it is a stream of your life. So a service like lifestrea.ms aggregates all your feeds (from an OPML file), your bookmarks (from del.icio.us or ma.gnolia), your twitter stream, your youtube channel, your blog posts, your tumblr posts, your last.fm playlists, your photos, your email, your search history (if you let it) — everything. This is useful in two ways. First, by collecting your fragmented web 2.0 identity, it becomes possible to share your output and content that’s relevant to you from a single location. There are all kinds of ways people do that now (just look at my sidebar there, or people’s RSS feeds that are rebroadcast on twitter, applications on facebook). Lifestreaming, however, pulls everything together and then reexposes it to the world. Additionally, since this is the data that we share on social networks already, the lifestreaming services themselves are forms of social network … with your Attention Profile, lots of sites can do this sort of analysis and present you with more relevant content for you (the details, privacy issues, and basic utility of this idea has been discussed elsewhere). This profile is data that you control — meaning you determine who sees it and what they see — and could help reduce the serious information overload problem that we’re heading toward (or have hit).
• lifestrea.ms goes into private beta
  Lifestrea.ms even enables users for the first time to practice the vision of a Portable Social Network and the Open Social Graph (not to be compared with the widget-only Google OpenSocial)…

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. 

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?

1. Adding verification mechanisms (MicroId, Email verification, OpenID verification) to your external accounts to create reliability and trust.
2. Adding an propriatary API - or do you think the open formats hCard, XFN and APML are sufficient?
3. Adding a special version for iPhones - by being “always on” with your mobile you are able to keep in the loop with what’s going on around you wherever you go.
4. Adding a “what feeds do my friends read” feature with the possibility to add selective feeds to your own reading list.
5. Adding pre-approved accounts by scanning for what’s on the web about your friends and sending them found links with an invitation email.
6. Adding news alerts by automated scanning for topics / keywords on blogs and searchengines.
7. Adding social features to bookmarks. (Who bookmarked this, most used tags etc.)
8. Adding possibilities to send new content by email and by mobile.
9. Adding short message notifications for mobile phones.

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: