Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’re well aware of the Lacy/Zuckerberg interview that took place in Austin. If we can look past this historical interview, you would notice that FriendFeed emerged and as some would quote, became the Twitter of SXSW.  Recently, there has even been a lifestreaming backlash posting that made the front page of Techmeme.

When Twitter first emerged, I was skeptical. I didn’t think I needed to broadcast to the world that I was eating or that I was sitting in traffic on the West Side Highway. I saw some applications for it in terms of groups getting together, but all-in-all, it’s been an application that was always secondary or tertiary to me. But, for a select few lifecasters (350k Feb ‘08, ComScore), this service has been serving them well.

Twitter contributes to a growing technological/MEdia segment called lifecasting (lifestreaming too). The notion of lifecasting/lifestreaming is that people are interested in your behavior both offline and online. This is not new at all, as even in the earliest days, voyeurism has been extremely popular with certain audiences. Facebook’s News Feed, is taking lifecasting to new levels and introducing it to audiences that never would have adopted it.

Lifecasting/streaming certainly brings a level of transparency to this world. In advertising, transparency is all the rage now with all of the major ad networks divulging their properties. In the latest Wendy’s advertisements, it talks about how their food is always fresh… and even the fish are from the north pacific. Transparency.

So I’ve been recently turned onto FriendFeed… how could you not with all of the recent hooplah around it. FriendFeed is certainly not the first in it’s market but apparently has a stellar team that’s building it out (ex-Googlers) and their credibility is gaining the startup some attention. In a market that’s all about transparency, someone has to aggregate all of the different lifecasting services together and create one platform or ‘feed’ (maybe the wrong term). FriendFeed aggregates all of my blog posts, Twitter “tweets”, NetFlix movies, Flickr photos, (and a lot more), all together and then mixes them with my friends (people I subscribe to). By doing this, you’re essentially creating a single place to get all the information you need about your friends. Certainly interesting. From an aggregation layer, I do like the opportunity that this affords.

In terms of FriendFeed overall - are we there yet? Here’s my FriendFeed. Is society ready to be fully transparent? Apparently Spitzer didn’t think so and he’s paying the price for it now. Honestly, I’m not ready….there are many things that I’m doing both personally and professionally that I’d rather not share. Not saying any of these things are illegal, but there are certainly times that I want my alone time. Anyone who knows me extremely well understands that I can easily survive alone. Justin.tv is the opposite and over 300k people are going to Justin.TV according to ComScrore in Feb 08… so there is an audience.

These lifecasting/lifestreaming services are not for everyone but it seems that many web applications are being built today with a massive target audience. Many of the major bloggers and journalists almost expect FriendFeed to be for everyone. I can almost garauntee that my mother would not use it.

There is one thing that we cannot change in this world and that’s time. We have 24 hours a day in order to live. Some of our lives are shorter than others, but if one thing remains constant, we’ve all been given the same amount of time per day to live. How much content can we consume in one day? How many different applications can we use in one day? How many different devices can we utilize each day? How many different feeds/websites can we use in one day? I personally don’t see where people have the time to update their lifecasting/lifestreaming feeds on a continuous basis. Life is all about priorities and for certain audiences, lifecasting/lifestreaming maybe just that… but for me, I think I may have to take a back seat position for now.

From an investment standpoint, we need to explore how this impacts the future of services.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 10:56 am and is filed under Advertising & Marketing, Internet & Web X.0, Media & Entertainment, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.