There’s been some interesting things happening in personal publishing happening recently - Twitter has become incredibly popular, and that has probably been the catalyst to a new phenomenon known as lifestreams. As far as I can tell, these were invented by British web developer Jeremy Keith, who described them thus:
Just about every time somebody publishes something on the Web, it gets time stamped. Wouldn’t it be nice to pull in all these disparate bits of time stamped information and build up a timeline of online activity?
We are producing so much information in so many different places that it makes sense to try and pull that all together into one place. Jeremy Keith did that himself, and you can see the results here. That used a PHP script, and is fairly basic. However, a number of different services have cropped up which emulate the basic functionality, and they have all have evolved Jeremy’s concept in a slightly different way.
Jaiku is an interesting, slightly Twitter-like, product which is much more comprehensive and allows you to pull in your own feeds. iStalkr doesn’t have the mobile emphasis of Jaiku, and is more true to the original concept with a few nice extra features - in fact Jeremy Keith is a user of the service.
The one I really like, though, is Tumblr. Tumblr was originally conceived as an easy way to create Tumblelogs, which are described by Wikipedia as preferring “short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging.” The whole point with Tumblelogs is that they are supposed to be a joy to update, with no work required, posting interesting things as and when. Tumblr realised that a great way to take that further would be to allow you to import your own feeds and republish that, lifestream style.
The result is a great service, for a number of reasons. It is a study in usability; signup is incredibly quick, and the backend dashboard is brilliant, ensuring that anyone will feel confident using it. Crucially, the whole concept is instantly understandable, in a way that perhaps iStalkr and to a lesser extent Jaiku won’t be to those not well versed in the concepts involved. At the same time, there are a number of brilliant features on Tumblr, including custom themes and domains, as well as a friends system, adding the possibility of getting a network effect going.
I’ve been really enjoying my Tumblr blog. I’m not sure that anyone’s reading it, but in a strange way it is extremely satisfying to see everything you produce online collected in one place. I guess we’ll see this gaining popularity in the tech world, and probably even breaking out of that - you don’t need to know what RSS is to use Tumblr, which makes barriers to entry low. Give it two years, and Tumblr could be big.
