Lifestreaming: Is the era of live-tweeting over?

June 30th, 2009

Live-tweeting is so 2009.

At your newsroom or company, you’re probably either the one being pressured — or doing the pressuring — to start getting social. Right?

You may start by creating a Facebook fan page, or a Twitter stream. But something is missing. Facebook may seem like great place to promote what you’re doing, and Twitter is an easy way to interact with your customers in real time, but neither are as visceral as you’d like.

Farewell, status updates. Hello, lifestream.

Most of the information we consume in this new media age is either presented in a traditional format (e.g. a newspaper Web site or blog) or a mishmash of data points (a la Twitter, the Wild West). If you think of a lifestream as a linear, time-based scrapbook, you’ll see the benefits of lifestreaming immediately. It’s a completely new way of gathering, documenting and syndicating information.

If you want to document what’s going on with your organization, if you really want to aggregate and present your content in a slightly more formal way, document your conversations and other relevant Web content, perhaps a lifestream is the way to go.

This isn’t to say status updates will disappear completely. The live-tweet is not completely useless. But just think: If you’re at a conference, for instance, you might post some things to the lifestream and still have tweets as well for just short missives. There’s a good chance you won’t want every one-liner posted to the lifestream.

However, if you want to compile several photos in one place, or post an audio or video clip in a more formal location, publishing it to a lifestream may be easier; your content can then be automatically posted on your social network(s) of choice.

For instance, I recently posted this group of mobile photos on my Posterous blog. Not only was I able to e-mail the photos straight from my phone to the page, but Posterous arranged them into a gallery…and then the photos were automatically compiled into this Facebook photo album.

A lifestream is, among other things, more of a real mobile blog than Twitter ever could be. With both Posterous and Tumblr, you can post photos and text via e-mail or SMS. (Note: Here’s a great comparison of the two services. Mashable did another comparison here.)

Imagine if your news organization presented its news in a blog format. Now imagine if the blog could be completed by reporters on the scene, who post instant photo galleries, sound clips and video. You could get a much better look at a particular topic, product or event, and you could easily trace the arc of a that particular topic, product or event.

For instance, if you have a crew of reporters at Austin City Limits, you could enable your reporters to post on the blog, but you could enable select citizen journalists to create posts that would appear alongside yours.

For agency folks, perhaps a lifestream would be a much better PR tool than a Twitter account, which would primarily be used for customer service and engagement.

Pretty cool, huh? For lifestreaming, we think the possibilities are endless.

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Have you or your news organization/company ventured into lifestreaming services like Tumblr or Posterous? If so, please post a link to the page! Would be interested to learn about your experiences.

Entry Filed under: lifestreaming