• Financial Times, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 11 AM

The Financial Times' Chris Nuttall reports that "lifestreaming" is gaining traction in Silicon Valley, as startups increasingly allow users to aggregate and organize their online social activities from multiple touch points. FriendFeed, a service founded by the creators of Google Maps and Gmail, is one of the leaders of this latest Web 2.0 movement. Nuttall points out that in many ways, FriendFeed's success comes at the expense of Facebook and MySpace. For example, FriendFeed allows users to aggregate all of their online social networking activity into one continuous feed, so users can receive messages from Twitter, photos from Flickr and blog postings all without having to go to those sites for updates.

So useful is the concept of lifestreaming that it's causing the tech blogging community to turn its back on walled-garden approaches to social networking championed by the likes of MySpace and Facebook. David Hornik, a partner at Silicon Valley VC firm August Capital, thinks lifestreaming could be the answer to social media monetization. "Facebook, MySpace and Google are all fighting to be the aggregator of your social data," he says. "Being that social data backbone gives the ability to monetize. I think this is going to be a big battle and in many ways it's the battle for the future of the web."

Former Googlers Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh founded FriendFeed. Buchheit admits that their company's goal is similar to that of their former employer. "We're looking to use social mechanisms to help organize information and to bring [attention to] new things that are interesting," he says.

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