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?
Collecta Launches Mobile Version Of Real-Time Search Engine
Collecta has just announced the launch of a mobile version of its real-time search engine. The mobile site is available at m.collecta.com.
Like it main site, Collecta mobile includes real-time news, photos, and status updates from more than 10 million content sources — from Twitter to Flickr and CNN and blogs. The mobile site is available [...]
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Facebook Serves 37.4 Trillion Page Views Per Year! (And Other Fun Stats)
Manoj Jasra discovered this entertaining video that takes recent research and puts it into a format that is actually enjoyable to consume.
Some of my favorite statistics:
- 90 Trillion emails sent in 2009, 81% of which were spam
- 4 billion photos hosted on Flickr
- 148,000 zombie (think botnets/click fraud) programs created each day!
What catches your attention?
Google Adds Flickr, Picasa Photos To Street View
Google has been showing crowdsourced photos from its own Panoramio service in Street View for just about a year, and it’s now announced that user photos from both Flickr and Picasa are being added to the mix.
The integration works the same way it has since last February; when images are available, a small box [...]
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Bing Maps Announces Awesome Flickr Intergration in JUST 1300 Words!
Bing has a lot to learn about sharing big news on its blog.
Take this post for example: spatial search: the next frontier
Cute title, but doesn’t tell me anything about the announcement.
Or take the actual post. 1300+ words and you have to read 628 of them, before you get to the announcment. Talk about burying the lead!
Fortunately, I have a man on the inside (hi Scott) that makes sure I don’t miss important news from Bing. Such as, the awesomeness of the forthcoming Streetside Photos in Bing Maps.
Watch this 2:35 video and you’ll see this cool technology integrates with Flickr images:
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What, you don’t have a couple of minutes? Here’s the summary:
Streetside Photos application (in technology preview): Available today, this tech preview mines geo-tagged photos from Flickr, and relates them to the Streetside imagery in Bing Maps. As more people contribute and share imagery, we can reunite those photos with the location where they were taken. This application will also enable the layering of historical imagery, so people can go back in time and see a location as it existed decades prior.
Awesome news, that was almost missed.
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Email Users Grew by 100 Million in 2009, 81% of Them Were Spammers?
Web site uptime monitoring service Pingdom has put together a nice list of internet stats for 2009. Most of them are from studies and surveys already floating around the web, but Pingdom adds in some of its own metrics.
I had a lot of fun applying my own fuzzy math to a number of the startling statistics.
For example, the number of email users grew 100 million in 2009, to 1.4 billion worldwide. During the same period, email spam increased by 24%, with 81% of all emails being spam.
Now, I know that you can’t assume that 81% of new email users were spammers–one spammer could account for 1% of spam, all on their lonesome–but that just takes away all of the fun! 
Another interesting observation. While Flickr is thought of as being the top image hosting site–with 4 billion images hosted–Facebook users upload more pics in a two-month span, than hosted by Flickr–about 2.5 billion per month.
And, just in case you thought the web-world rotated around North America, here’s a reason why you may want to provide language translation on your site:
Social Media Power Profiles: Is Google In Your Mix?
Building up an authoritative status on social media profiles is a very important element that users spend hours doing daily. Usually it’s with some of the most popular social communities like Digg, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc. How many social media enthusiasts and search marketers actually stop to consider their Google profiles though?
When I discuss [...]
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Yahoo’s Employees Home for the Holidays
Would the last person to leave Yahoo, please turn off all the lights?
You may think I’m mocking the gradual decline of the tech company, but I’m not. Not this time.
Apparently, in a measure of frugality, Yahoo is sending home all but its most essential employees for the Christmas break. According to AP:
It’s the first time that Yahoo has required most of its 13,200 employees to use vacation time or unpaid leave during the holidays. Only employees performing essential duties will be working from Dec. 25 through Jan. 1.
You can expect more spam in your search results, viagra offers in your Yahoo mail, and porn on Flickr during this time. OK, maybe not that last one. 
Yahoo Partners with Facebook, Plans to Focus on Selling Big Pens?
At the rate Yahoo is dumping its own technology and partnering with others, the only thing left that will be “Yahoo built” will be these bloody big pens:
A little over a year since Yahoo announced the expansion of Yahoo Profiles, the search engine, portal, social network, we-don’t-know-what-we-are company is apparently ready to ditch its own social network aspirations and jump into bed with Facebook:
It will enable them to connect with Facebook friends on Yahoo!, view a feed of their friends’ related activity on Yahoo!, and share content—such as photos from Flickr or comments on news stories—with all of their friends on Facebook. The content that consumers share with Facebook friends will then create a loop that drives visitors back to Yahoo!.
OK, so you can’t blame Yahoo for making this move. After all, social networking is Facebook’s strength, and not Yahoo’s. But, I’m starting to worry what Yahoo has left to call it’s “strength.”
When your business is supported by the strength of other companies, it becomes very easy for your foundation to be undermined by them. 
Act Now to Avoid a Flickr Reputation Headache!
Depending on your point of view, Flickr just created an easy way to spot any pending reputation disasters, or just made it easier for one to occur.
The photo sharing has added a feature we’ve seen cause reputation headaches in Facebook–the ability to tag a person inside a photo. Here’s how it looks:
Now, in the half-full camp, this new feature will make it easier for you to be alerted when an embarrassing photo of you is posted to Flickr. Tackle it now, before anyone else sees it.
In the half-empty camp, this is bad news because those photos of your partying the night away, are easier for people to find.
Either way, you need not worry about the new feature–so long as you take some preemptive action.
You can simply wait for each photo to appear in your "Recent Activity" and remove your name from those that you don’t like–you can’t delete the actual image, just the name tag. If you don’t visit Flickr often–or don’t want to take any chances–Flickr has a new "People in Photos" preference page that looks like this:
What if you’re not a Flickr user? Fortunately, the site has thought of that:
We also extend that same level of personal control to people who aren’t on Flickr. If you wish to add someone to a photo who’s not yet a member, that person needs to give their approval to be added.
Consider this a PSA for those of you that find yourself in embarrassing photos. 
