July 19th, 2007

Welcome to the Stream

You’ve probably heard the term “stream” in relation to attention, as in “attention stream”.

The usage of the word is spreading, however, and is now finding its way into web application vernacular. It is called a “lifestream”, “socialstream”, “friendstream”, “contentstream”, among others.

It has come to mean a list of the always-updated items in a system. Here are a few examples:

Twitter
The stream in Twitter is the list of latest sms messages from your friends
Facebook News Feed
This stream has lots of different types of items, made up of activities like adding friends, joining groups, and adding applications
RSS readers
Your RSS reader displays a stream of the latest posts from the blogs you subscribe to
Del.icio.us Links
Your list of links submitted to Del.icio.us is a linkstream
Digg Spy
The latest items added or dugg in digg

It should be apparent that almost any items updated in real-time can constitute a stream. And therefore a stream can be used in almost any application that people use. The question is: is it useful to see a list of what you’ve done or what you’re friends are doing? In many cases, it is at least interesting, if not useful.

Satisfaction’s Lane Becker suggests (and I think he’s right), that streams are as core to today’s social applications as the checkout sequence was to apps 5 years ago. He says:

‘The “stream” — let’s call it that, because “river” just doesn’t cut it — is, like tagging, one of those canonical, web-native inventions that is already so totally fundamental to inhabiting an online social system that its adoption is inevitable in every app that plans to aggregate people in a collaborative networked setting. The stream is to this round of the web what shopping carts were to the last one. It’ll show up everywhere, but put to very different ends in different places.’

In addition, many apps are starting to tout the stream as an important feature they offer. In a recent post on Mashable, streams are mentioned several times in relation to the newest social startups: 20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking Profiles.

The stream trend is only increasing. Anything you can grab via an API or RSS can be a stream.

And because of this, because it feels like we’re really starting to see the emergence of a new interaction paradigm around streams, I keep hearing Pink Floyd singing “Welcome my son, welcome to the stream”.

Grab the RSS Feed

Comments ( 9 Responses so far )

Pingback: » Welcome to the Stream

1. Rahul on July 19th, 2007 (Comment) #

I call it the “stream of consciousness” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_of_consciousness_%28psychology%29) — although not necessarily “thoughts as words” for people, it kind of represents the “thoughts” of any particular social website. Some are more conscious than others; Twitter certainly has a lot more of the immediacy involved in consciousness than an RSS reader.

In a way, it’s the true push/pull Web. With all this talk about the Semantic read/write Web, people seem to forget that push/pull is just as significant a change to the overall architecture of how things work.

It reminds me of a technology described in David Brin’s Earth (a book that did a great job of fleshing out the cultural relevance of a worldwide data network in the 80’s) which largely involved subscribing to certain kinds of data on the book’s version of the Web and then being kept up to date on that information without having to put any extra effort in. It was a lot like Google Alerts. Except Google Alerts was only the beginning, wasn’t it?

2. Bud Caddell on July 19th, 2007 (Comment) #

I think as conversation mediums adapt online, so will our process of building community platforms..

Speak of which, I’ve published our process flow on my blog (http://www.passion2publish.com/2007/07/how-to-build-an.html)
How to build an online community, or our process revealed..

3. Rob May on July 19th, 2007 (Comment) #

Very informative, it´s time to clear this kind of words, we use them everyday and everyone gives them different meanings.

4. Jeffrey Augustine Songco on July 19th, 2007 (Comment) #

Have you been hearing the buzz about Streamy.com?

5. genevieve on July 20th, 2007 (Comment) #

I believe that Flickr was one of the very first to use the term “stream” when it launched a few years ago… ie. their Flickr stream of photos. Everyone else has just coined that concept from them.

Pingback: streaming? : Andrea Hill - afhill.com

6. Chris Saad on July 20th, 2007 (Comment) #

Streams are central to what we’re doing also.

I have recently proposed 2 new ‘Streams’ that compliment the concept of a ‘Lifestream’.

I call them AttentStreams and AudientStreams.

You can read more about them here: http://www.particls.com/blog/2007/05/life-after-pageviews-proposing.html

Also - we have just released our new Particls Sidebar into the wild which I would call a Persistent, animated stream of events and news that matter to you. An AudientStream or River of news like nothing before it.

We are also about to announce a web-service to convert Lifestreams into APML (www.apml.org) - Drop me a line for some inside info

Pingback: fresh wordpress installation » Flow and Streams

Welcome to the Stream

Comments ( 9 Responses so far )

Add Your Comment

Preview...