AOL in the Lifestreaming Game with buddyupdates. Who Will Be The Next?

I have bumped into a post by Mark Krynsky today titled "AOL launches buddyupdates Lifestreaming Service and Nobody Notices". Since I am far from a heavy AIM user myself (I only have 2 contacts and one of them actually forced me to get another IM protocol when I clearly felt I did not need one), I had not been aware of the buddyupdates existence neither so it was interesting to check it out, especially because it was the second lifestreaming event today on my radar after Facebook's news on News Feed filters. And certainly AOL is still a name big enough for us to at least make notice when it announces something new.

But the truth was very prosaic - AOL simply did not launch anything new, instead it improved the product it already had (and probably did not consider the announcement to be big enough). In fact, buddyupdates has existed for over two years now but in the beginning it was a very basic service and only supported updates from user profiles, away messages, and participation in message boards. I am not sure about how successful the service was or how involved the users were throughout the 2 years of its history but since I have only found 2 pages of results on it in Google Blog Search, I guess it was not the heaviest used service from AOL. But anyway even now the service still proudly wears the usual "beta" tag which shows that they don't promise any perfection here so probably it is still a work in progress for them and we should expect further improvements from them.

You won't find any real surprises in how buddyupdates works - it is exactly what we expect from a lifestreaming service. You log in with your existing AIM account details, you configure your profile by linking this account to your accounts elsewhere from the selection of the supported services and you start broadcasting your updates to all your AIM contacts. Similarly you can watch your contacts' updates on a separate tab (here it is called "everyone" actually - simply because the service is only for your AIM contacts only).

What is interesting about buddyupdates is that you can not only browse the latest updates from your friends via the web interface we are accustomed to on Twitter (though this one resembles Pownce a little to me), buddyupdates actually displays all the alerts for contacts with new statuses right in your AIM contact list.

It is obvious that buddyupdates has changed a lot since its initial launch in 2006. Currently the service supports updates from a total of 14 services, including Twitter, Facebook (Update: Facebook is not supported actually: they used only "F" instead of the full name on the logo and I decided it was Facebook while it actually was Flickr), del.icio.us, YouTube. Besides, you can create your own stream of updates using RSS for any blog or any other information channel that you can create an RSS feed for.

In general, I myself am quite pleased with what I've seen: the web interface is very clean and simple, adding new services to update from is impressively easy. The only thing that took some time was adding an icon since I did not have one attached to my account so I had to visit AOL profiles to do that. Otherwise it is a very smooth experience and I really think it is a great new direction to follow for AOL - especially since I don't think that any other IM service already offers anything similar by updating the statuses automatically from a range of the feeds you choose to use. And you know, I actually started to regret my unwillingness to use AIM for instant messaging and I think I will at least install the plug-in again into my Miranda.

But who will be the next to follow AOL in this trend? I am quite sure that there will be others who will follow since even web giants finally start to realize that we produce tons of information online and the need to aggregate it into one bundle and distribute to all our friends is really acute. So I actually think the next up will be Google with creating something very similar for Gmail. Well, probably not very similar initially - maybe they will only start with Google's own services. But if it gains user adoption (and it will in my opinion) they will just have to broaden it and include third-party services as well.

It is absolutely logical that it is easier to launch a lifestreaming service that hugely depends on the social network when you already have a good number of people connected to each other in your database. So it is no surprise for me to see AOL in the lifestreaming market - it does not seem to be that difficult to aggregate a number of services and ensure their delivery to a network of friends. The real difficulty for an individual user is when it comes to building the network of friends - you have to figure out where to find people to follow first (even though we have solved this problem partially using both FriendFeed and Twitter).

At the same time if you already have a network of friends somewhere (be it your address book or contacts list on any IM protocol you use) it does not really take a lot of time to join your friends in yet another place - and if it proves to serve a good purpose, people may just stick to it. So I think it is a good idea for many services that already have social networks within (like Facebook or MyBlogLog that still refuses to follow the obvious road) to venture into the lifestreaming field - if only to improve the general experience for the users and ensure some additional reasons for them to return to the site again and again.

Do I see a problem in people having too many accounts on too many lifestreaming services? No, not really. It does not mean that every single person will actually use all of those that he or she could belong to by being a member of any social network that chooses to introduce lifestreaming as well. Chances are every person will have a central preferred hub for communications but if these networks are good in integrating their main services with the lifestreaming addition (in the way that AOL has done, for example, by displaying alerts right in the buddy list), chances for success for the main service will definitely be higher. Besides, it is now easy enough to update a number of services from one place (like Ping.fm) you can update all the services from one place without any significant efforts. And if lifestreaming can improve my use of Skype or LinkedIn, I am all for it to be added everywhere.