Second Brain – All Your Content

Lifestreaming is becoming more popular

I love the concept of streaming online activities. Steve Rubel recently wrote a post on Micropersuasion about the concept. Reading Steve's explanation and rationale together with the comments was like reading myself explaining why we need Second Brain.

In Steve's words:

Over the last few months I have really changed how and where I create content. For a long time all of the action was here, on my blog. Today I am posting to Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter and Facebook. I also have tons of other less active accounts too - digg, Blogger, MySpace, YouTube, MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, Jaiku, Pownce and on and on.

Where I will publish in a year's time is anyone's guess. However, what you can bank on is that I will have even more community accounts than I do now.

The problem here is that this has created dozens of online identities for me, a single individual. People who want to follow me need to pick their poison - this blog, Twitter, etc. I use each medium differently but what I hate about it is that I need to think about the information I want to publish and the venue that's best for both me and my audience.

[...]

I really like that there is a single place attached to my name that rolls up all of the content that I am publishing online. [...]

Aggregated Lifestreams could be the next big thing on the web, particularly as community expands. I am also thinking about how this might be coupled with services like social networks, Twittergram, Spock and OpenID. What do you think of this idea?

Well I, of course, couldn't agree more. This is the direction the trend will go, and peoples' need for something to help them keep track and manage everything will only grow, as well as their need for aggregating their public their activities into a unified stream.

Several commenters to the post agreed:
Adele McAlear said:

What I'd really like to see in a lifestream app is the ability to update all of my content from a single interface. Someone out there must find a way to input profile changes once and have it update the relevant fields in the most popular social sites. Add some widgets for updating Twitter and Flickr, and maybe even a WordPress api. No more logging in to each site to update content, it could all be controlled from a single interface. That would be a beautiful thing. It's good to have dreams.

Allen Fuller :: Flat Creek replied:

Adele, we're on the same wavelength as I posted the exact same idea to Twitter earlier! To really turn things upside down, give us a Meebo-type application for our blogs, SoNets, photos, microblogs, etc. If someone like Josh could offer both the ability to view all our content from several platforms AND update that content on the same site - WOW. Talk about a serious disruptor.

Second Brain is going to please both Steve, Adele and Allen. We'll get all their content inside their library, let them manage and search it, as well as create new stuff directly on the service via Second Brain. We'll also give them a public profile page where all their public internet activities are streamed.

Rules of order

On CNET's blog on Web2.0 I read a short piece on structure that made me think about the problem with structure and social interaction.

Brian's rules of order: CivicEvolution | News.blog | CNET News.com.

CivicEvolution, still in development, is designed for political committees, nonprofits, and small collectives like neighborhood groups and teams. Fundamentally it's a wiki, but unlike most first-generation wikis, it offers a great deal of structure. (This is an important trend in wikis, which I'll be covering more soon.)

I think this touches on the relationship between the structure that is necessary to create an automated computer-based system and the freedom that is required to make people enjoy it and collaborate. Tagging, folksonomies and wikis are great examples of community-driving interfaces and functionalities. But they are radically unstructured compared to traditional systems. While this has been a main reason for their success, it is still a very immature and cowboy-type style of collaboration. This may make it difficult to approach for the later adopters of such systems.

But the early users of such systems are doing a good effort on sharing and collaborating and are thus creating some structure in these systems - rules for tagging and vocabularies for interaction and descriptions. Some call this collabularies. The point is that it is an emergent phenomenon powered by the collective effort and intelligence of the users. Not an inherent property of the system. It's social, individual, rich, flexible and dynamic. And that's why it works.

This is kind of like a social platform in the making. The early knowledge and effort that people put into these systems today will create a platform with more sophisticated functionality for large scale adoption in the future.

The challenge, though, is to do this from the social people perspective and give them tools for structuring that support the way they experience their world - an individual and dynamic structure with an interface for social interaction.