Who owns the information you create on the social sites you are a part of? That is the question being asked by many right now in the social media space, and the answer for the most part is a resounding "It belongs to us!". This is apparent by looking at the growth of such groups as Open Social and DataPortability. And now, there are some practical solutions starting to appear that address at least a part of the problem. Namely, how do we gather our content and take it somewhere else? This is what is currently being called lifestreaming, and it is something you should be aware of.
Lifestreaming is about content aggregation. YOUR content. No matter where you create it. And then sharing that content where you want to share it. Sounds pretty nice doesn't it? Well, there are quite a few services out there now providing the tools to accomplish this. Plaxo Pulse, FriendFeed, socialthing!, and now Facebook are a few of the top names in the space. As John McCrea of Plaxo says, this is a natural evolution of the Social Web with the user at the center.
The recent announcement that Facebook has opened up the mini-feed to allow importing of other services is potentially huge. While others in the space still need to get users to sign up for a new service, Facebook has already got the users. This could mean trouble for the others like FriendFeed, but so far Facebook doesn't have a very comprehensive list of services they'll import. FriendFeed actually has a Facebook application that can accomplish much the same thing, but is more complicated and involves signing up for an account.
In my book, FriendFeed is still a step ahead by being much more open and now having an API that allows developers to extend the service (there is already Alert Thingy, an AIR based desktop app for following your FriendFeed stream). Facebook currently allows access to some content such as status updates, but still doesn't allow easy access to feeds like the users News feed.
This should be an interesting space to follow in the emerging data portability solutions of the social web. For now, you can follow FG SQUARED's involvement by watching our FriendFeed at http://www.friendfeed.com/fgsquared.
