Does the appearance of requests for 'lifestreams' mean that the internet and it's websites are failing as a medium of communication?
I wrote a while ago about how RSS is popular as it makes the often overly-multimedia internet, bearable.

The appearance of people talking about wanting 'Lifestreams' seems to point to another indication that something is wrong with communication on the internet.

It seems that once again, the mass of information on the internet with everyone using ALL services available at once, has made social-internet life unmanageable.

This is why something such as FriendFeed will work.

FriendFeed allows you to add your friends like a social network, but then add all their accounts to their one profile. The result is that their blog posts, Flickr photos, Del.icio.us favs, Twitter posts etc, ALL come into one 'lifestream'.

The problem is the effort you now have to go to to find out all this information.
Say I make a new contact on the internet. I have to go to their Facebook and become friends there. Visit their website and see if they have a blog and RSS to subscribe to. Then scour that website AND facebook and whatever else I have to find if they have Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, LinkedIn, Flickr, and so on.
It's an unmanageable nightmare that FriendFeed is trying to work backwards to solve (and does a good job).

I think the solution is this - there is still a need that IF you are an 'online' person, you just have to have a central website which is the main port of call for all these other services.

Social networks are great for meeting people - but it all become a communication nightmare.

I think that maybe all of your accounts and web services feed into your personal website and it is there that your direct people to, eg it is on your website that you have your Del.icio.us feeding in. Of course, you can invite people to network you directly on Del.icio.us, but you keep them looking at that info on your website.

So rather than constantly building up and up all this information noise of 'I have to go there to check their photos, then back there to see their blog, now to Twitter to see what they are up to..', do we need to set some examples in web usability and recommend manageable systems of using all these services without adding to the noise?

At least by adding all my accounts to FriendFeed, Facebook is solved in a single application since all my services feed into the one FriendFeed-feed, which in turn updates Facebook with everything.

RSS took-off because trawling websites became messy and complicated. Many people wouldn't even know what websites look like since they get all the content via RSS and never have to visit the original site.
Isn't it far better to return to the original concept with RSS and us it as a way to merely inform people that they should visit a website again as it has been updated? (rather than have full RSS posts).

I did hear on Twitter though that one die-hard and shining example of a man has ditched all his RSS feeds in favour of actually going to a website if he wants to read about it.
This does make sense now considering most websites that you would want to visit are the modern, blog/news type sites that have bound to have been updated every time you cared to visit anyway. You don't really need RSS to tell you that something is new.

Modern websites have become like TV in terms of their constant and fresh (well TV isn't exactly fresh) content. Websites have long since stopped being static, so maybe what I'm digging at is that it's possible that RSS should be redundant?!

Anyway, back to the point of the post: for me, books are to computers what RSS is to websites. I still can't get any reading done if it's in digital form. A plain old book still wins over digital communication because you can cut off from everything else, walk and sit somewhere else and focus on a device that only does one thing on one topic.
I was hoping on getting a Kindle one day (I love the ebook concept and have many), but I'm not sure this will solve things either. How can I focus on one book, when there are 50,000 others loaded on it, begging for my attention? (I am a black hole to useless information).
It's a bit like productivity and how using computers teaches you how to lower your attention span. People who want to actually get anything done on computers these days have to perform another irony - stop multi-tasking. Turning off all IM's, emailing checking manually, Twitter's off and so on.

Does everything have to be multipurpose these days? Have you seen how tricky it is to get a phone that is a phone?

See the top of my website for an example - all the networks I am on. The problem is, it's addictive and useful enough that you can't ditch these wonderful services (Stumbleupon is my latest) and make a stand. But it is a question to ponder once again - how do we make the web usable? It is possible that 'web usability' is evolving out of 'you should put that search box there' and into communication stream management?

Incidentally, I use MarsEdit for blogging. I love it because I can write in a minimalistic, plain white window, fullscreen, using a 22 point typewriter font that just makes typing so tactile and focussed.
Do many book writers still use typewriters? I think those devices had it right - one device for one job. Also maybe we need the typing sound back - I reckon it would help me focus!

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Posted By Justin Fleming to Justin Fleming's fuchsia shock on 3/27/2008 11:05:00 AM