Paul Glazowski at Mashable touches on the subject of lifestreaming today (“Shyftry: Good, Bad, and Potentially Quite Ugly“).
Advocates, he says, have “essentially come to the conclusion that attempts to own or compartmentalize information on the Web are futile, and that any effort to get the global conversation surrounding stories gathered from various places has some measure of legitimacy and is worthwhile to pursue.”
Enter the world of lifestreaming, which is effectively a socialised network of RSS aggregation with with addition of commenting.
I must say, my opinion on this area echoes the quote from the movie Jurassic Park, where Jeff Goldbloom’s character says “You were concentrating so much on whether you could that you never thought to ask if you should.”
From the standpoint of convenience I can see some logic on lifestreaming; however this only extends to the standpoint consumption of information. There’s so much information on the web, and so many different sources of content that a centralised and flexible location for each user’s chosen content streams makes perfect sense.
The issue I take with emerging lifestreaming applications like Shyftr and Friendfeed are they worsen the disconnect between islands of conversation, not lessen it.
As Glazowski explains:
“What Shyftr appears to provide instead [of centralising commenting at the source of the information] is a social commentary platform independent of those information sources. And if we can posit that the audience of blogs is strewn about multiple gateways of Shyftr’s type, we can intimate that a bizarre sort of grand disconnect would result. And then chaos ensues. In that picture, everyone does their own thing, and everyone, whether consciously or not, creates a great big mess of things.”
Advocates are correct in saying that attempts to own or compartmentalize information on the Web are futile. After all, blogs operate largely independently of one another, barring URL references to other articles. What emerges in this are countless parallel and localised conversations. However this disconnect is duplicated – if not worsened – in lifestreaming applications. At least content sources maintain a sense of context. In removing the context, lifestreaming applications devolve conversations to discussions about discussions; and significantly the disjointed pockets of conversation continue at the level of the aggregator instead of the blog.
With more and more people are talking about Collectivism, it’s important that we bear in mind what this notion entails. Collectivism focuses on the group mind, in which context and content are key, and discussions and dialogue are the vehicles to delivery this content. Lifestreaming seems to be an attempt to capitalise on this notion, but it’s unsuccessful.
As Glazowski implies, the Holy Grail in online discussion is a means of bridging the disconnect between pockets of conversation. Until that happens, the entry of additional applications that seek to “streamline” the discussion process will only server to deter it.
References:
- “Shyftry: Good, Bad, and Potentially Quite Ugly” Paul Glazowski, Mashable, 12 April 2008
