Max Gladwell

The nexus of green living and lifestreaming…brought to you by Twitter, FriendFeed, MySocial 24/7, Alert Thingy, Seesmic, Deepak Chopra, and more.

Lifestreaming is “an online record of a person’s daily activities, either via direct video feed or via aggregating the person’s online content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos.” This is the natural evolution of email, blogs and social networks. Rather than communicating via inbox and apologizing for “mass emails”. Rather than posting to a blog on a weekly basis or updating your profile daily, it’s now possible to stream your thoughts or activities (and follow those of others), on a moment-to-moment basis in real time. And there is a cottage industry being built around this trend.

At the heart of it is Twitter, which we’ve posted about but promised more. It’s a simple communications medium that has changed how thousands stay in touch and keep current. At first glance it can seem quite banal. This Wired essay sums this sentiment nicely:

I think one reason Twitter leaves me unsatiated is that it asks the most boring question possible: “What are you doing?” Call up a friend and ask them what they’ve been doing lately and you might get an interesting response. Ask them what they’re doing right now and you’re almost guaranteed to get a boring answer: “Eating lunch.” “Thinking about doing some laundry.” That’s because if they were seducing a Nobel Prize laureate or rescuing a baby from a burning submarine, they wouldn’t have answered the phone.

But Twitter is not just about the friends you know. It has become a cutting-edge source of news and information. Since it is so easy and concise, news tends to hit Twitter first, then the blogs, and then mainstream news. Even with live events, we learned that Hillary won Pennsylvania through Twitter before CNN reported it on air because the same people informing Wolf Blitzer were simultaneously Twittering. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, CNN, NPR, CNET, and countless others have Twitter feeds. In order to utilize it as a resource for information and living green, though, you need to find and follow relevant Tweets.

In addition to searching Twitter, which is not entirely easy or effective, there are a couple other resources. Twitterholic ranks the top 100 based on the number of followers. This is a sign of general relevance, but none jump out as green authorities. The source one might expect, TreeHugger, is curiously silent in this venue. A better way to find good feeds is TweetScan, which offers a general keyword search in addition to user-based. For a head start on building a green Twitter feed, we recommend that you follow sustainablog, BigGreenSwitch, greendigitmedia, sustainabilitynow, and (of course) Max Gladwell. More than likely each person will, in turn, follow you (unless you don’t want them to).

Unfortunately, the main Twitter site is not the best way to manage your incoming or outgoing feeds. Which is why a number of Twitter clients have emerged. The best so far is Twhirl, which also accesses Pownce and Jaiku (similar sites) as well as FriendFeed (more on that below). This is a piece of software that runs on your computer, making it easy to monitor alongside email and your browser. Another is Alert Thingy, which has Flickr functionality.

Still, there’s much more to lifestreaming than Twitter. Anything communicated digitally, whether to friends or the world, is part of lifestreaming. So if you post to or comment on a blog, Digg a story, upload a video or photo, bookmark a webpage, review a book, recommend a song, or Twitter a Tweet, these all contribute to and ultimately weave together your own, unique lifestream. And just as you can follow people on Twitter, you can follow entire lifestreams by monitoring all of these many sources. Fortunately, there are several tools that help you filter, organize, and manage what otherwise could be both time-consuming and chaotic.

By sheer necessity, FriendFeed was created to help you consolidate your personal lifestream and track other people who are relevant to your interests by aggregating them into one place. It’s like an RSS feed for life. With a quick scan, you can see what everyone is doing on the social web, more or less in real time. It could be Barack Obama, your best friend, a celebrity, journalist, or someone whose lifestream interests you. As of today, there are 35 different services that can be fed into and tracked by FriendFeed. For example, subscribing to the Max Gladwell feed gives you a stream of MG information and content that is relevant to social media and green living. Our newest feed, though, will soon incorporate video.

Seesmic is Twitter for video. Instead of streaming text-based messages, you record and post video messages. Here is Deepak Chopra speaking about his daughter’s new startup, Intent.com.

He started this Seesmic conversation, and it continued…

…for six more video responses, as if exchanging Tweets. Plus, every time you post a video, Seesmic can alert your “followers” via Twitter, as well as feeding it into your FriendFeed. We’ve just added Seesmic video comments to this blog, as well, so you can leave video messages instead of typing. See blow…

Finally, if you want an easier way to manage your FriendFeed, you can install the MySocial 24/7 sidebar for Firefox.

In sum, lifestreaming can and will be used to further the green movement, the BLUE movement, and the collective pursuit to improve our quality of life. As the song says, the revolution will not be televised. But it’s already being lifestreamed.

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• CarbonFeed: Your Aggregated Environmental Footprint
• Be a Beacon: The First Principle of Social Media