Social networking activity feeds are all the rage, where it’s now necessary to microblog every detail of our lives. I think it’s funny that Windows Live profiles started a new promotion for, “Your Online Updates Together in One Place”, which finally conceding that Microsoft is giving up on that game. Windows Live Spaces failed, so they now leech off other systems to hide how inactive users are with Microsoft’s services. I’ve already highlighted how I think Live profiles are jokes.
Now most timestamped updates you’ve made online can be placed in one activity feed. I have noticed other apps are following along the same lines when it comes to displaying user details. My profiles for Nine Inch Nails and Dredg both have iconized links to my third party accounts, with nin.com integrating YouTube videos and Flickr photos into its internal interface using each services’ tagging system. TweetDeck and other third party apps already split up Twitter threads alongside Facebook statuses. As third-party APIs open up, more sites will start combining shared information.
By mixing in text typed by me in this blog, Twitter, Facebook, Last.FM, film log, Goodreads, Windows Live Messenger statuses, and posts from the half-dozen forums I frequent (ir)regularly, you can probably piece together a rather disturbing stalker tracker. Is it banal? Most likely, but at least you’re now more likely to have alibi after getting mistakenly picked up by the po-po.
Mark Pilgrim does something interesting at http://firehose.diveintomark.org/ – some other people (new media douchebags) call it a \’lifestream\’. If something spits out RSS/Atom etc., you aggregate it – if something doesn\’t, you write a scraper which does and add that. You don\’t treat each stream the same: so, your last.fm player feed might be rendered with little music icons and smaller than say, a blog.