Max Gladwell

Adding tributaries and estuaries to the Max Gladwell lifestream: BrightKite, FriendFeed Rooms, Facebook mini-feed, MobyPicture, and rmbrME.

For context and background, check out our first post on lifestreaming. This is the constant feed (stream) of information, links, photos, videos, thoughts, insights, locations, blog posts, friends, acquaintances–both the quality material and the minutia–of one’s life. It’s primarily online, but we’re seeing it taken into the real world via mobile in many new ways. For the purposes of the Max Gladwell lifestream (or brandstream), it is specific to our mission of green living through social media and vice versa. For us, social media is both a topic and medium. Recently we’ve added a few new features–tributaries and estuaries, if you will–to our stream and would like to highlight them.

BrightKite is a location-based social network and microblogging tool. It’s still in private beta, so the first four to comment on this post will get our remaining invites. BrightKite takes social networking into the real world. The driving force is answering the ongoing question: “Where are you?” Through the web interface or SMS, you can “check in” from wherever you are. If it’s a place you frequent often, you can add Placemarks to update with a single click. This updates your BrightKite profile, complete with a Google map of that position, and can also update your Twitter with the location and a link to your BrightKite update. As part of the stream, you can email photos in order to visually represent your location. There are, of course, a number of privacy settings to limit access to your location info. Under the “What’s happening” link, you can see where your friends are around the world or check in on who is where in the immediate area. When using SMS, you can text certain commands to determine your location. So if I text “? Urth Cafe”, the system will text back a number of options based on my last location. I then text back the option number, and it not only updates the address but the actual business. This is a great way to track and communicate the stores, restaurants, and shops you frequent. When the service hits critical mass, you’ll be able to see who else is at that location, whether you know them or not, and send them messages or meet up based on your shared use of BrightKite alone. Next month, iPhone users will be able to update their locations automatically using the phone’s triangulation capability.

FriendFeed just announced a new “Rooms” feature that enables users to creates specific types of feeds, whether public or private, as a way to filter the often overwhelming stream of information from your friends and those you follow. We joined the Environment Room, which was created by Chris Baskind and consists of “discussion and media sharing related to the Environment, Green Technology, Sustainability, and allied topics.” There currently isn’t a way to search rooms, but we expect that feature to be added soon.

Facebook continues to add the ability to import various lifestreams into your mini-feed. Our feed includes the Max Gladwell RSS, Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Reader, YouTube, and Flickr. If Facebook is your primary social media home, this provides an efficient way to keep up with friends’ lifestream activity.

MobyPicture is a new photostreaming service that gives you one-shot updates to your Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Hyves.net, and tumblr profiles, as well as to your Blogger or Wordpress blogs. We’ve just started using this and appreciate the ease of emailing one photo and having it post multiple places. This isn’t the first service to do this, and there are other community features that we’re still exploring.

rmbrME (remember me) is a new social media-driven contact service. You set up a profile with links to your various social networks like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ning. When meeting a new contact, instead of exchanging business cards you text or email their phone number or email address to rmbrME, which sends a text or email to your new contact. They link to your rmbrME profile and choose to join your social networks, including the rmbrME network itself. The founders of the company hope that this has a viral effect. We appreciate how this potentially eliminates the need for business cards; indeed, we’ve put off getting them as a result of discovering rmbrME. We tested it at the recent Room 367 green networking event. We met 10 people at the event and texted them our rmbrME contact. Of those, three checked our profile and one of those joined us on MySpace. None of them signed up for rmbrME and became a “contact”. It’s clearly just getting started, and we’ll keep trying. Because we don’t want to have to get business cards.

Feel free to enter the conversation by following our lifestream at any of the above outlets. Join “The MG Network” wherever is most convenient for you. Do you lifestream or brandstream? Let us know with a comment so we can follow along, as well.

Related Posts

• Ten (More) Ways to Change the World Through Social Media
• Be a Beacon: The First Principle of Social Media
• Together: Solve Climate Change the Easy Way
• Ten Ways to Change the World Through Social Media
• Will Social Networking stop greenwashers?

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