Lifestreaming has been a popular topic on andydesoto.com over the last few weeks, ranging from excitement over the soon-to-be-released Sweetcron to appreciation of FriendFeed. It’s been big in the blogosphere, too, apparent, for instance, in Read/WriteWeb’s recent post “How To Lifestream From Your iPhone.” However, in order for the concept to really take off, it’s going to require one important thing: simpler multimedia content generation.
What do we have now?
The value of lifestreaming is that it aggregates multimodal content into one “stream.” Unfortunately, our options are pretty limited when it comes to different kinds of media. Here’s a short list of what we have at our disposal:
- video
- photographs
- audio
- text
- location
Out of all of these, I’d say only text and photos are acceptably integrated into our lifestyles. While services like Qik and Flixwagon and webcam technology makes video slightly more accessible, and some of the latest mobile phone features provide utilization of others, our options are basic.
The problem: without engaging content of different multimedia formats, lifestreaming is much less interesting.
What do we need?
In order for lifestreaming to reasonably represent an individual’s life, we need to embrace the unemphasized bullets above: video, audio, and location. Along with these, others would prove useful:
- vector (direction and speed)
- satiety
- weather
- time
- mood
- other senses
Unfortunately, there are some major technological barriers keeping our devices from accessing some of these metrics.
What should we do?
Until technology can catch up, we’re best off focusing on that first list. But here’s the problem: even though the tools for video, audio, and more exist, it’s tricky to capture or implement such forms of multimedia. In order to make a reasonable quality video, for instance, there are way too many steps involved to belie ease of use.
Therefore, we need simple tools at our disposal to transform accessible modalities into ones that are harder to come by: text into sounds, words into mood, location into weather, photos into video.
The solution: simple web and desktop applications to intelligently convert one type of multimedia into another.
Examples in the wild
Of course, there are already some tools available to do this sort of thing for us. Wordle turns words into photographs. Jott turns voice into text. There’s still plenty of room for innovation and excitement, too. In order for a new service to be successful in this space, it’d just need to follow two simple guidelines: provide support for as many formats of input and output as possible, and maintain a mobile interface.
Do you know of any services that do this sort of thing? Please share them!
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