I get why this Thing is called "Mashup Your Life." But for how I will end up using it, "Mashup Your Friends' Lives" would probably be a more accurate description.
I joined FriendFeed this afternoon. I'd chosen it because I knew at least one friend of mine was already there (so I'd have someone to connect to) and because my coworker who's doing the More Things program had joined Lifestream.fm and loathed it. But about an hour later, another 23 Things-er invited me to join Lifestream.fm, so I've ended up comparing the two. Based on a few hours familiarity, I think I like FriendFeed slightly better (I see why the More Things on a Stick program would like people to try these services for a few weeks, but this close to the deadline it ain't happening). It mostly has to do with aesthetics, and that I don't like Lifestream.fm's search engine for trying to find out if your friends are already on the site. But I'll have to play with both sites some more to see if that preference holds. I'm glad that both services let you make your account private. I will probably make my accounts public until the end of More Things on a Stick--that's only a few days, after all--and then go private and personalize my chosen service.
I see the two sites differ in their focus. FriendFeed puts your friends' avatars first, and the source of each post is almost an afterthought, in small gray print at the end. Lifestream.fm leaves your friends' avatars out altogether and leads with the icon of the post source (Twitter's little t, the RSS feed's orange square, etc.).
Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, these social networking site aggregators don't seem to be nearly as popular. I think these kinds of services could be really useful. I'm tired of tramping around from Facebook to LibraryThing to Google Reader to Twitter and so on, just trying to keep track of what all my friends are doing. Now the question is, are these sites just about to catch on, or are they doomed to never be quite noticed by the world at large?
By the way, if I invite my friends to join either of these services, am I being pushy? Maybe the last thing anyone wants is still yet another account on another service. Or am I just doing social networking the way it's supposed to go, trying to forge more connections? Does anyone know if Miss Manners has addressed this issue?
I managed to get both the FriendFeed and Lifestream.fm widgets into this blog, which is overkill, but I'll be taking one out sooner or later. Both are mostly made up of posts from this blog--it's oddly circular.
