I was playing with Six Apart's Action Streams. It allows me to put a lifestream of all _my_ activities across all _my_ social networks into a single stream I can display on my blog.
Eh, that's not what I want.
Friendfeed, the poster child of 2008, is similar to the Facebook newsfeed. It turns my _selected_ friends' _selected_ (by them) feeds into a stream. This is almost like a stream of others' Action Streams.
Eh, that's not what I want. All these use _my_ stream or someone else's stream that was consciously _assembled_, or these aggregate a collection of streams I need to actively collect into a new interface.
SocialThing on the other hand is more what I am looking for. It turns my existing _service streams_ into a stream.
How is that different?
Well, I use particular social services for a particular reason. Each service has optimized how I follow my network. Hence, for each stream produced at each service, there is an optimized interface for following and interacting with that stream. And each of those streams are set up in terms of privacy and access between members of that service.
Also, my networks in those different streams are not identical, since a different network emerges on each service due to the actions on those services. For example, my LinkedIn network is very different from my Twitter network.
SocialThing aggregates those separate streams using the logic that I set up in the service itself, connecting me to the folks I have already connected through those services, unlike Friendfeed, where I need to invite people all over again and see services of theirs I do not want to see.
How it should work is I identify the services I use and the streams from those services show up in one interface from which I can not only follow all these streams, but even allow me to interact (say, upload) with these streams. Also, with a bit of smarts (and maybe some help from me), it can make correlations between services, knowing who are the same folks in each (the overlap).
Either there is a service that does this or there is one in the making. It _is_ the year of the lifestream.
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