SocialOyster – A Very Fresh and Promising Approach to Lifestreaming

SocialOyster is a very new lifestreaming service that I am very impressed by after giving it a test run. The best part about SocialOyster is the unusual selection of services the site provides in addition to lifestreaming as it is. But let me start with a short introduction. I am often amazed at how startups manage to do everything wrong when pitching bloggers. Today's example was when I extracted from my "Spam" folder an email with the subject "fyi" and three lines of text in the email body:

www.socialoyster.com

best

markus

My first reaction was obviously to delete the message and that was what I did but then I stopped for a moment thinking that a link that contains "social" in the domain name could relate to some new social media startup with very low chances that this will be a malicious porn site. So I had to extract the email again and check the application myself.

After doing a quick search on Google Blog Search I am under impression that Social Oyster launched some time late last week because they received a few mentions in the blogosphere since then (most of them not in English). But unfortunately the company behind this new product with a funny name seems to be kind of reserved - no official blog for the product, no pitches in the emails to bloggers and contact page with text in the German language only.

But maybe this is a typical case when a good product will sell itself without any additional marketing? You know, after taking a close look at the product, I suspect that this might really happen here. True, the product is obviously in beta and needs quite a lot of further polishing - especially in the usability field, but the idea here is really amazing so I definitely recommend everyone to try it out.

Essentially SocialOyster is a lifestreaming service combined with a social search for you to find your friends across various social platforms. Lifestreaming itself introduces two new names here: Your Oysterpass (your own stream of activities) and Your Oysterline (the place for you to track all the activities of those that you follow).

To be objective, the set-up process takes quite some time and there definitely is some learning curve before you actually manage to handle the product easily. But the advantages that present themselves after you get to know the service definitely outweigh the learning curve. The list of supported services is not all that long right now: SocialOyster only supports 11 services (Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Jaiku, Google Reader, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Last.fm, LinkedIn, and Xing) plus you can link your website and an RSS feed. The major limitation that I see here is that you seem to be able to add one RSS feed only.

SocialOyster has actually come up with another unique approach to displaying the timeline of your friends' activities here (wich I personally like better than that of Plurk): the Oysterline is shown in a number of separate panes - one for each service so you are able to see all the items sorted by the service, not by friend of by time. As a result, when 3 of your friends post something to Twitter, all the 3 messages will be displayed in a separate section for Twitter and once you finish reading them, you can simply close that pane.

I do think that the lifestreaming part of the service definitely needs some polishing to become at least somewhat more intuitive and add some features, like the ability to send replies to messages and comment on various events. But I think it is the search functionality that really makes the service unique instead of just another FriendFeed clone. On SocialOyster you can perform two types of search:

1. Search your neighborhood or any particular area on the world map for users of Twitter, Flickr, Jaiku, YouTube and SocialOyster itself
2. Search for various usernames of your friends across different platforms.

Of course, it is fun to see all those icons of people around you twittering or submitting photos to Flickr. But the best part is that any user that you find in the search results you can actually follow right here in your Oysterline without even having to add this person to your contacts on Flickr or follow him on Twitter. Same goes for your friends - once you find them in various social services using the search by username, you can easily add your friends as well as their friends if you so choose to your Oysterline to be able to track them in one place.

To summarize my thoughts, you can actually create something like a personalized FriendFeed on SocialOyster where for every person you can choose yourself which services you really want to follow and additionally you can follow some local people for your share of local news - without even having to add them elsewhere.

I am very much impressed by the initial offering here. I realize that there are quite a number of things to work on for the developers (like replies to items, desktop client to follow the Oysterline and some usability polishing) but I am sure that for such an early version of the product SocialOyster really is promising. And I definitely do not regret my decision to check the initially discarded email, however short and non-informative it was.

Oh, an if you decide to create an account on SocialOyster for yourself, don't forget to follow me there as well.