Lifestreaming…Affordances

Okay, so I just spent the entire morning trying to figure out some way to both aggregate my various online activities as well as publish them. Basically, I wanted to lifestream. Of course, when I started looking for how to do this, I didn’t know that lifestreaming is what I wanted.

Unfortunately, after trying many, many services: tumblr, soup.io, posterous, and jaiku, I found that none of them does what I need them to do. Or, rather, that a combination of them would serve my needs but not any one service.

Tumblr: Used to be able import RSS feeds but new users cannot (if you have an older account this is fine). So this cannot be used to lifestream anymore. Sigh. The reason this is a big problem for me is that this was the only service named here that allowed you to queue posts. This is a highly desired feature because I don’t want to spam my friends with links.

Soup: Was able to import many, many feeds but no post queue. Sigh. I also found the interface clunky and was unable to do any real searching.

Posterous: No auto-importing. And the main way to post was via email. Which is a good thing, I’ll grant you. But they don’t have a queue, which is the biggest problem for me. Otherwise, I might have switched.

Jaiku: I simply found it unusable.

Basically, the affordance I was looking for from a lifestreaming service was the ability to auto-import (key ingredient) and to have control over when (and how many) posts I put up a day, which I find important since the other key thing I wanted was the ability to auto-post to other sites.

The best solution suggested was to basically set up your own website… Something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while. And it might finally be time.