AOL Launches Stand-Alone Lifestream

AOL unveiled its social aggregator and publisher, Lifestream, as part of its instant messenger platform last Fall. Now they’re launching a stand-alone site at lifestream.aol.com. After it appears they’ve failed with Bebo, this social venture may have a chance of success, in the opinion of TechCrunch at least—they’re saying, “This is what Google Buzz should have been.”

Like most social aggregators, Lifestream gathers content from several social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube. Lifestream uses existing friend lists on those social networks, so users don’t have to recompile their friend lists. Users can also cancel updates from entire networks, users or users on networks (i.e. ignore your friend’s Twitter stream but keep following his Facebook). It’s also integrated with Facebook Connect, so there’s no separate login, and users can publish back to social networks from the platform.

Lifestream also has a network of its own, and plans integration with Google Buzz in the future. TechCrunch doesn’t mention whether the service automatically hides duplicate messages—for example, your friends who have their Twitter statuses automatically publish to Facebook, too.

And then there’s the mobile platform: the website is compatible with mobiles, but Lifestream also has AIR, iPhone and Android apps. The mobile apps auto-note location, and you can use them to post pictures.

TechCrunch concludes:

The Lifestream product is simple, intuitive and really, really useful. Frankly it’s what Google Buzz should have been – both an independent social network on its own, but very deep integration into all of the other social networks you are likely to use daily. It’s nice to see actual innovation coming out of Aol.

In a time of more and more fragmentation, I think many people are looking for a product like this. If Lifestream is really as easy and seamless as TechCrunch says, and if it can gain acceptance, it could be the product AOL needs to turn its social fortunes around.

What do you think? Will you give it a shot?

44% of Google News Visitors Don’t Click Through

The third annual News Users report from research firm Outsell has some interesting findings. While more and more people are going online for their news, and fewer people are getting their information from newspapers, it seems that many online news consumers are more like . . . well, “grazers.” And this might actually be good news for Germany’s Federation of Newspaper Publishers.

TechCrunch reports that 44% of US visitors to Google News do not click on any headlines, preferring instead to skim article snippets. Unsurprisingly, the Internet is becoming an ever more popular source for news, especially what Outsell calls “news right now,” with 56% of consumers turning to online news sources (up from 33% a few years ago).

Google News and other aggregators are a more likely destination than a single paper’s website, as well, with 31% going for the aggregator and only 8% picking a news site. (18% chose other. I guess, with rounding errors, that adds up to the 56ish% turning to online news sources?)

Of course, the numbers on the Internet eroding newspapers’ subscriber base aren’t surprising. Two months ago, we saw that American consumers were will to pay as much as $3 a month for their news (which I thought was kind of crappy, though many disagreed). Turns out it’s even crappier than I thought—according to Outsell, 75% would turn to a different source if their local newspaper sites put up a pay wall, and only 10% are willing to pay for a newspaper subscription to get online access. (Cough, NY Times, cough.)

The more interesting concept here, however, is that Outsell sees Google News becoming a destination for news instead of a starting point, like Google Search is. That might actually bode well for at least one competitor—Germany’s Federation of Newspaper Publishers. As we saw yesterday, the publishers are suing Google News as a monopoly for displaying snippets from their stories. (Robots.txt. Srsly.) If it turns out that many consumers are only reading the snippets and German newspapers aren’t seeing the downstream traffic, their case may have a little more merit.

And then they could just block Google News.

What do you think? Is Google News (along with other aggregators) becoming a destination for online news? Will this US data help out the German newspaper publishers’ case?

Social Media and Content Discovery: A Growing Relationship

While the commercial Internet age is in its teens according to linear age it has some difficulty focusing. Just when users are getting used to a world that is search engine centric there comes along the social web or social media or social networking or social (insert your word here) to truly change how people make sense of the sheer volume of data on the Internet. This change or movement toward the social web is happening at an ever increasing rate and creates opportunities as well as difficulties for those who are trying to harness this power for business.

Nielsen reports at its blog in a post from Jon Gibbs, VP Media Analytics

In the beginning there were ISPs, which then gave way to portals ― aggregators of content and links ― which then led to the rise of “search” as the dominant form of Internet navigation or, how we get to where we we’re going on the web. However, as with most forms of evolution, change is constant, and over the past two years search navigation has appeared to shift to social media.

We continue to see that social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation in a big way. But how? Is social media taking the place of portals and search as the hub of online navigation?

Nielsen goes on to categorize people as either ‘searchers’ who primarily get their data from search engines, ‘portalists’ who use a portal site to access data and ‘socializers’ who use, you guessed it, social media to get their information. As this last group grows there could be some significant implications moving forward for everyone who is using the Internet for business.

As a result the socializer group actually feels that there is too much information on the Internet. Much more so than those who simply use search engines. Think about it. A search engine user takes it on faith (the vast majority of the time) that the entire Internet for a keyword or key phrase is boiled down to just 10 best results. Of course, if they only take their online sophistication that far then the Internet does appear to be easy to manage. Socializers, on the other hand, spend a lot more time online and hear / see a lot more than regular Internet users. It can become very noisy very quickly.

So how do they manage this? Through their online social network of buddies, of course. At this point, now the real recommendations and buying decisions are happening based on what other people, not an impersonal engine says. Hopefully, they are giving actual experience to help their online connections make more informed purchasing decisions. That’s the theory at least. Take a look at the significant differences in how socializers and searchers use various formats for information. Why Wikipedia is even part of the discussion baffles me but what do I know?

So what are you? Searcher? Portalist? Socializer? A little of all of them. Will social media displace search engines as a primary source of information in the near future? What does it mean to you TODAY as an Internet marketer? Share your thoughts and let’s learn from each other.