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?
Andy Beal Brings His Reputation Management Workshop to Auckland & Sydney in May!
I absolutely love doing my online reputation management workshops. An entire day of me sharing just about everything I know about reputation management. Not only do I enjoy them, but the feedback has been amazing–just about everyone that attends walks away a reputation management expert!
So, I’m going international and bringing my workshop to Australia and New Zealand in May!
Thanks to a collaboration with Bullet PR, I’ll host my Auckland workshop on May 18th, then jump on a plane and host it again in Sydney on May 20th!
This one-day master class is the only way to get hands-on reputation management training from me, without paying my normal consulting day-rate. In fact the Auckland workshop is priced as low as $595+gst, while the Sydney one is just $550 for PRIA members!
Here’s what our day together will cover:
- Introduction to Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- The Art of Generating Buzz
- Get Five Stars at Customer Review Sites
- Blogging for Brand Control
- Social Networking Meets Reputation Management
- Own the First Ten Links in Google
- Building a Reputation Monitoring Safety Net
- A Blueprint for Fighting a Reputation Attack
- Your Seven-Step Action Plan
This will probably be the only time I host my online reputation management workshop "down under"–simply because it takes soooo long to fly there! So hurry and reserve your seat today!
Google Wants Feedback On Buzz
Google is asking for user feedback and ideas for its Google Buzz product, and has setup an ideas forum using Google Moderator. After signing in with a Google account, users can submit ideas or vote on existing ideas from other users.
According to Google’s blog post, this ideas forum will remain open until March 31st.
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above or, in Facebook, by clicking on the “View Original Post” link below. ***
Yahoo CEO Asks, “Facebook, what’s their revenue?”–Er, About $1 Billion Carol
Yahoo celebrated its 15 year anniversary yesterday and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz decided that it would be the perfect time to take a swipe Facebook.
When asked why Yahoo wasn’t as hot as Facebook, she replied: "Facebook? What’s their revenue?"
Oh no she didn’t!
Well, as if on cue, Inside Facebook comes up with some compelling calculations that suggest Facebook will hit $1.1 billion 2010.
First, their calculations for 2009–keep in mind these are simply guestimates.
Then, estimating revenues for ads, partnerships, virtual goods, and such, they come up with their 2010 prediction:
A wide variety of sources we spoke to expect Facebook to pass $1 billion in revenue this year, possibly reaching $1.1 billion. This is significant growth, but likely still the start of the hockey stick.
And boy, it is some hockey stick!
The company will, in our view, gradually chip away at brand advertising spending on other big web sites, including Yahoo and MySpace. The optimistic case for Facebook, in terms of its brand advertising revenue, is that will get most of this advertising and bring in up to $20 billion per year, eventually.
$20 billion a year in revenue? That’s a big number, maybe one that will even get Bartz’s attention. 
Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!
China Says Google as Vital as Electricity…This Just In, Google Becomes Electric Utility
Not since chocolate and peanut butter have two things ever meant to go together as much as these two stories.
First, we have researchers in China opining that they can’t conduct their research without Google:
“Research without Google would be like life without electricity,” says Xiong Zhenqin, an ecologist at Nanjing Agricultural University in Jiangsu province.
In fact a study reveals…
More than 80% use the search engine to find academic papers; close to 60% use it to get information about scientific discoveries or other scientists’ research programmes; and one-third use it to find science-policy and funding news…84% of the scientists who responded to Nature’s survey say that losing Google would “somewhat or significantly” hamper their research
Maybe these scientists shouldn’t teach their students how to hack into US networks then, should they? 
OK, story number two ties into this magically.
Google finally won approval…to be an electric utility…With their new approval to be a utility, Google could be a smart grid / smart charge service provider.
If I had a late night news show on the Comedy Channel, I’d so enjoy discussing the epic timing of these two stories! 
Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!
By The Numbers: Twitter Vs. Facebook Vs. Google Buzz
Twitter caused a stir Monday when it lifted its curtain enough to show us how much activity the service is seeing currently, and how it’s grown since 2007. And while many reports talk about visits to Twitter.com flattening, Twitter’s own chart showing the number of tweets its users are publishing is staggering.
Twitter says it’s currently [...]
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above or, in Facebook, by clicking on the “View Original Post” link below. ***
50 Million Tweets Per Day? We’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat!
It appears Twitter is finally had enough of third-party analytics companies getting all of the publicity over tweet counts–so it’s spilling the official beans.
Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.
I may have to admit to contributing maybe half that number on some days. 
Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!
How Google Buzz Hijacks Your Google Profile
Google Profiles existed long before the launch of Google Buzz earlier this month. But since that time, Google Buzz has hijacked Google Profiles in a way unmatched by any other Google product. That’s bad news for those who want to fully opt-out of Google Buzz. Doing so kills your Google Profile. It’s also bad news [...]
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Google: “With Buzz We Failed To Appreciate That Users Have Differing Privacy Expectations”
Google scheduled a privacy discussion for reporters and bloggers at its San Francisco offices a couple of weeks ago. The timing turned out to be unexpectedly ironic.
The idea was to “walk through a short presentation about [Google's] guiding principles for privacy, how we use data and some of our comprehensive privacy efforts over the past [...]
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Google Buzz Facing Lawsuit from 31 Million Users?
This took a little longer than I thought, but a Florida woman has filed a class action complaint in San Jose federal court alleging that Google Buzz shared personal data without consent.
The legal complaint accuses Google of breaking various electronic communications laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The plaintiff is seeking injunctions to prevent the company from taking similar actions in the future, and unspecified monetary relief.
Eva Hibnick and her legal team–who we won’t name, because clearly they agreed to help her for the glory of suing Google–wants to enjoin the 31.2 million U.S. Gmail users that were duped into revealing their most personal contacts.
Like all lawsuits that involve Google, don’t hold your breath. This thing is likely to be a long, protracted mess, with many appeals and objections. If nothing else, this should add to all the reasons why Google should set its arrogance aside and not assume it knows what’s best for its users.
I suspect, we’ll never see such a clumsy product launch from Google, ever again.
