Slowly but surely, my online life has spiraled out of control.
Between posting photos on Flickr, updating my status on Facebook, blogging and commenting on and perusing various other sites, I’m having trouble keeping all my activities straight. And keeping track of what my friends are up to on the Web gets even harder.
But there is a way to keep it all together: lifestreaming sites. These online destinations, many of which are quite new, are like overlooks that offer a panoramic view of what you and your friends are doing on social media sites across the Internet.
If you’ve used Facebook, you’re familiar with how it offers a running list of “feeds” detailing your friends’ activities: which programs they’ve added to their Facebook profiles, for example, and which new people they’ve connected with. Lifestreaming sites are a supercharged version of that. They aggregate information not only about what you and your friends are up to on Facebook, but all over the Web as well.
I tested several of these sites to see whether they would help me get organized — better in touch with what my friends are writing and doing. It turns out lifestreaming is useful, though definitely not for everyone.
FriendFeed: FriendFeed is an easy-to-use starting point for organizing your Web life and sharing your thoughts about it with other people.
Friendfeed can gather updates from dozens of social Web sites, making it simple to arrange all my Twitter posts, Gmail Chat status updates and other online tidbits in one profile.
I also wanted to use FriendFeed to collect all my friends’ activities. This was simplified by the site’s option to search my Gmail address book for FriendFeed users. Surprisingly, about a dozen people I know — including my older brother — were already using it.
Feeds on the site were not that visually appealing…