Everybody loves speculating on what the future’s going to be like - the future of the web, the future of commerce, the future of Noeleen on 3Talk - and the future of blogging. It seems that one popular take is the “Lifestreaming” approach, in which instead of sharing your insights and opinions, you share links to other people’s insights and opinions. And your own status updates.
I had a spare domain lying around, so I figured I’d see if I’d be able to set up a functional lifestream page, using nothing but notepad and some freely available stuff. And this is what I was able to come up with:
Pretty, clean, functional, and the sort portal you’re likely to provide as a URL in comment fields and signup forms. How was it constructed?
- Everything lies in the index.html file, including the CSS.
- I got those little Web 2.0 Icons from here.
- The lifestream is courtesy of Friendfeed’s native embedding code, which you can access by opening this URL in a browser: http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget
- And that was pretty much all there was to it!
You can add over 40 services to be aggregated by Friendfeed now, and most of them are services that you already know and use, so you can get going with zero coding experience. The row of icons I have there are all of popular services that I have accounts on, and is just as easy to put together.
Why lifestream? This question was raised a while ago, and the silent consensus reached was that most people just don’t have time for blogging anymore, but still want to engage in the social sphere. A lifestream is a sort of compromise on that, in that it allows you to share and discuss your topics of interest with the rest of the world, while not chewing up too much of your time.
Well, then you get those Twitter users … oi.
