Lifestream Groups
I have posted on Lifestreams, which is aggregating your profiles into the one space, and also on Friendstreams, which is a way to keep up with all your friends lifestreams.
This comes in two flavours, most lifestream services are a social network, so you can add your friends and keep up with their lifestreams.
But just say they don’t have a lifestream in the same service you have a lifestream, well then you can use a friendstream service to collect all your friends profiles and kind of make a lifestream for each of them in order for you to keep up with all their content in the one space.
This is a great idea as you don’t have to rely on your friends making their own lifestreams, you do it yourself.
So we have lifestreams (with friendstream features) and DIY friendstreams, and next we have Group streams.
You could say a friendstream is a group stream of your friends, but this is from your personal outlook…what about if you and some select friends all agree to put your lifestreams on one page, then this is a group stream.
Ziki Groups
Ziki has lifestreams, and you can add friends, but it only adds avatars, you can’t see a friendstream.
But it still delivers, as Ziki groups is basically a homepage that streams several lifestreams into one stream, ie. lots of people’s lifestreams on the one page.
I suppose you could use any Lifestream service to make a group lifestream, instead of entering your personal feeds from various places, just enter all your friends lifestream feeds.
eg. john uses afeeda, abby uses ziki, rich uses correlate.us, rebeka uses mugshot and Shay uses iStalkr…so you grab these 5 feeds and enter them into one of these services eg. afeeda…there you have it a DIY group lifestream.
Mugshot Groups
Mugshot has lifestreams and also friendstreams (see your friends content on your page).
Like Ziki it also has groups, one space to stream many users, you are even able to add external feeds, also able to share outside links via a bookmarklet (this is called Swarm).
You can comments on items, group chat, even chat on items
This kind of makes it like a community, without being formal, as the community content is just aggregated content from each person’s lifestream from the network.
It reminds me of a Tangler group…Tangler gives you a user space, and you can add friends and chat one-to-one, and you can chat in topic rooms…what Tangler isn’t about, is a personal publishing space. I guess you could even compare Tangler with Meebo Rooms.
Instead of a discussion forum approach, Mugshot groups is more about aggregating personal networks into one stream…from there you can share outside items into the stream, leave comments, chat, etc…
Basically Mugshot groups is a more dynamic Ziki Groups, instead of just being able to read the stream, Mugshot allows members to interact giving it a community feel.
Now if people in a Mugshot groups didn’t interact (chat, leave comments, share outside links), it would be like Ziki groups, an effective aggregated lifestream site…what I’m saying is if members don’t go the extra mile and participate in the group, it won’t die, it’s still good for just reading.
Like FeedEachOther (FEO) and others, Mugshot is a great way to form a group network in order to pay attention to stuff that matters, leveraging on friends, instead of doing it all yourself…the social web coming full circle.
NOTE: FEO doesn’t have groups, but you can share stuff with friends, and bookmarks your friends, so you can visit their page to see what they read and clip…this is more about feeds you read, rather then your lifestream.
Jaiku Channels
Jaiku is a lifestream, you can add friends, but these are just icons on your page…Jaiku also allows you to post content into your lifestream (actually Ziki also allows you to post content into your stream).
What makes Jaiku different, is that it’s similar to Twitter, in that it’s a presence blogging social network, so the lifestream part kind of comes second in it’s prime directive.
NOTE: also see Pownce, presence blogging and file sharing, with a difference in that you can limit some of your posts to certain friends, you have a public user space, but their isn’t a general public stream (posts you have sent to just select friends will only be able to be seen by those same friends on your public page).
Jaiku Channels have content from Jaiku members as well as re-syndicating content from external feeds.
The posts in these channels don’t appear in your personal Jaiku, this makes it quite different than Mugshot and Ziki…if people don’t post in a Jaiku Channel, it will die.
But then again it’s not quite different, as these external feeds you add to a Jaiku channel could be Jaiku lifestream feeds, so in the one place you get a lifestream group as well as group only presence posts.
In essence, perhaps Jaiku Channels and Tangler are more about topics, where as Ziki Groups and Mugshot Groups are more about people, with the latter two as long as you have a lifestream, these group streams will survive.
[ADDED 12/09/07: Streamy : Social Network RSS Reader, lifestreams and attention groups]
[ADDED 5/12/07: Plaxo Pulse is lifestreams and friendstreams, it also has groupstreams. If you make a group about the product Jajah, you’d have to get some sort of way for a machine to scan the group member lifestreams for terms like jajah, voip…in fact the Jajah group page has some tags that describe the group. At the moment you are just seeing a mashup of lifestreams of all the members, this is similar to a friendstream…the idea is for a topicstream isn’t it.]
[5/12/07: Onaswarm - lifestream, friendstream and groupstream called swarms]
[23/06/08: FriendFeed Rooms]
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