10 July 2008
How To Stream Your Life Online (Pt.1)
Posted by Andrew Garcia under: Cyber Media; Reality Augmentation; Technology .
So you think your “first life” is awesome enough to share with the entire world, eh?
I’m going to talk a little bit about various services you can use to stream every waking moment you have onto the Internet. The cybersphere is one of the best means to put yourself out there and if you have something interesting going on, people WILL find you and comment on your life. Not only is this a higher level of social interaction and connectivity, but it represents a new way to interact. You are essentially expanding your reality with a virtual output rather than just being a perceptive “input only” being.
Please note that there is a downside:
- Maintenance- You will have to constantly be checking in to various locations, will have to actually make an effort to keep it up and may need to tweak various service settings as you get a feel for how to use them appropriately. Fortunately there are services that make your life easier in this regard (see below)
- Digital umbilical- You will be plugged into your cell phone and most likely your PDA and primary computer much more than you normally would. Setting up mobile connectivity with the various services you use will facilitate the process but you will have to make an effort.
The best services to use for your digital lifestream, in no particular order are:
Facebook - In the past couple of years Facebook has made it easier than ever to stream your life on the web. Without using avatars, Facebook managed to facilitate digital transparency in peoples’ lives. You can stay in touch with old/lost friends, get in touch with new ones, upload pictures and expand your social networks with an easy to use interface. The downside? Very limited mobile accessibility (even the PDA interface is lacking in features). Also there’s a lot of garbage apps that clutter up peoples’ accounts, pushing it into a Myspace direction.
Twitter - Using your phone or a client you can rapidly upload your state onto the Internet. Twitter brought on the “microblogging” movement where a network of people are simultaneously updating their status and letting others know what is going on their lives, how they feel that morning, etc. Everyone can see everyone else’s “tweets.” The downside? It gets tedious to sort through everyone’s tweets and often you will find yourself putting out more than you care to get in. In other words you may be tweeting all the time but may easily fall into a pattern of not caring about others tweets (with exceptions here and there). The trick is to expand your network and socialize with others.
Tumblr - Probably one of the easiest blogging systems to use. It’s incredibly user-friendly, lets you microblog, blog, reblog (awesome feature!), socialize and customize without too much hassle. Fast set up too. Id’ say probably my favorite blogging tool on the web right now! The reblogging feature is great too because you can take other people’s posts and reblog them onto your tumblr account. The effect is that your information (or lifestream) is very likely to get massively propogated! The downside? It has the same problem as twitter since you are able to see others’ posts. It is easy to get sucked into pushing out lots of posts without responding often to others. The reblog feature does a fantastic job of countering this though.
Brightkite - An awesome geoblogging tool that takes it to the next level. It tracks what you blog based on where you are! You should really check this out! The downside? You have to check in wherever you are for it work. However it balances out with Brightkite’s ease of use for “glog” purposes.
Plurk - This is an awesome microblogging tool. It’s similar to Twitter but has a chronological spin on it. It’s all time-event based and tracks what you “plurk” (what status you put up) based on when you did it. It has a really cool interface too! Check it out! The downside? It’s still a relatively small community but otherwise doesn’t suffer from the same microblog problems that Twitter does because of the public and private timelines.
Other services worth mentioning:
Pownce is another microblog/blogging tool.
Identi.ca is another microblogger but puts a more public access spin on it.
Ping.fm is an AWESOME tool to aggregate all your services. Post to all your sites with one post!
Profilactic is an AWESOME tool to aggregate all your services (also). Instead of posting, aggregate the feeds into one large lifestream!
4 Comments so far...
Alex Weber Says:
10 July 2008 at 12:28 pm.
Cool list! I’d like to hear more of your thoughts on how this makes you a cyborg, and why YOU use these services. Also, profilactic and ping.fm only made it into the postscript? Crazy! I depend on these. (Also Profilactic’s WTFMO code is AMAZING for aggregating all of your digital personae in one place.)
Alex
Andrew Garcia Says:
10 July 2008 at 12:34 pm.
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your comment.
Profilactic and Ping.FM will be featured in future posts where I focus on the future and the aggregation of emergent technologies. This post was intended to be a brief summary of a few of the services. Note that none of the services were brought up in any particular order since they are all equally awesome (including Profilactic and Ping.FM).
Get it in,
A
Andrew Garcia Says:
15 July 2008 at 3:52 pm.
Alex,
To address your other question, I definitely think using social media is cyborg technology. One of my personal goals at the moment is to transcend my own boundaries of communication.
Currently I am limited to communicating with people in person, over the phone, using Internet chat based sites and a few other things here and there. It seems that communication over the Internet has escalated to the point where people are not just transmitting meaning (in other words, effectively communicating) but broadcasting meaning to multiple recipients, through multiple channels with different results.
This is a clear step in human evolution and as such, I personally promote it!
An example would be when I push out a status update via my cell. My friends and acquaintances on Plurk get the message in a chronological context via the public timeline. It gives them the impression that one of their friends is doing “X” activity at that moment along with whatever other friends they see. Brightkite presents the message in a geographical context, telling people where I’m at and what I’m doing while I submit my message.
I think if we had aggregators even more powerful than Profilactic that would combine geotags with chronological displays and event handlers that showed status updates in different ways depending on context, that would be another positive step in the evolution of human communication.
Hope I’ve cleared that up a bit!
Get it in,
A
Becoming Cyborg Says:
16 July 2008 at 4:31 pm.
[...] Online Social Media allowing a connection between any persons anywhere at any time, taking place over any networked infrastructure. [...]