The Pervasiveness of Streams

OK. I lied. I said I wasn’t going to write anymore over here, but whatever, I’ll tweet it up later. Last night at SF New Tech, I had an interesting conversation with the 2 other BrightKite users I had encountered - I knew they were there since I got an alert that they had checked in, as had I.

Background Last night was the SF New Tech event. There were some interesting demonstrations, a little pornography, and a lot of chatter (my favorite part). Towards the end of the night I found myself tucked in the corner with two other BrightKite users - I recognized them from their nametags and the fact that I got updates from the service that they had checked in.

An interesting conversation formed about the utility of BrightKite itself. I suggested that a large part of its utility spawned from its integration with Twitter. They both contested that they keep those spheres separate (an interesting discussion on its own). Someone made the interesting comment that Twitter was the What and BrightKite is the Where.

And that got me to thinking…
Streams As Data Type More and more my work with Blue Whale and increasingly with Lil’Grams is demanding a new type of perspective on the information design. What I have been noticing, and to be honest embracing, is the notion of flows of information as a data type. While there are a number of static concepts that we have become accustomed to, we are now forced to deal with data not as a repository but more as bookmarks around a series of time.

Flows are all around us, APIs are the hoses we use to manage the torrent. Of course, this is not a localized phenomena and certainly it is not specific to Twitter (though they’ve made it fashionable to talk about them). Managing the raw output of data from RSS feeds, IM conversations, Activity Streams, News Feeds and of course the whole flood of LifeStreams requires adjusting our hope that time can stand still, archived in the ever-overflowing Inbox of unread items.

Forget the Counter An interesting theme I see amongst my friends and colleagues is “removing” unread items from their various Inboxes. I often sit and laugh a little on the inside at the futility of it all. I have 3775 unread in my Blue Whale account, 108 in Lil’Grams, and 4582 in syncpeople. Now, it’s probably more of an annoyance sine the UI on these apps are designed to remind us of the things we haven’t done. For most of those things, they just don’t matter enough, lacking the momentum to move them to the top. Everything truly important circles back to the top, usually encased in new forms of sarcasm, urgency or anger. I know, it’s probably not the best way to manage it all but it works well enough inside my bubble.

Concurrency So when you think of digital presence - the online shadow of your physical/spiritual presence - how would you best want to represent that? The emergence of streams in our digital lives is, in many ways, aligning our thinking in a way that we are only subtly appreciating. I see this every time I overhear someone trying to explain Twitter to another. There’s futility in writing straplines and elevator pitches for something that is quite fundamental to the way we experience life.

My advice is always the same to people when it comes to Twitter. First, I’m not going to try and explain it. Second, go sign up and follow 30 people. Third, keep following and removing people until you find the right mix. You’ll know when you got it since you won’t want to be without it. Does that sound all that different from how we socialize on the playground?

Which brings me to my main point. If we are attempting to build our own real-time personas online, which services service our needs the best. Seems we have many questions to answer, but we can use the classic model:

• Who - Facebook? LinkedIn?
• What - Twitter? Pownce?
• When - Upcoming? Socializr?
• Where - BrightKite? Dodgeball?
• How - Qik? Seesmic? Blogs?

I don't claim to have the answers to these questions. In fact I embrace not knowing the answers and look forward to the next steps. Of course, I'll use an analogy that's quite fitting. The secret to being in the water is to keep your entire body immersed - it's usually when we stick our heads out and look around for too long that we are vulnerable.

Watch out for the big swells on the horizon.

Still don’t believe me? Watch Clay Shirky break it down like a fraction.

Update: Some Jung

Tags: streams, flow, lifestreaming, presence, twitter, jaiku, pownce, facebook, linkedin, brightkite