This week Facebook hosted a blogstar-studded event to introduce a more people-focused platform for interacting around your Facebook statusphere in “Twitter time.”

Let’s review what this news means to you as a user and as a new media enthusiast.

After Facebook’s failed attempt at acquiring Twitter, the company seems to be on a b-line to unite people in an online social graph while connecting them through a dynamic and rapid fire conversation and engagement platform.

The company introduced new profiles for public figures and organizations, which were once called Fan Pages. These new profiles will look and feel just like regular individual profiles. The idea is to facilitate the connection and communication of fans and constituents with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations.

Facebook also redesigned the home page for you and your social graph. Now you can visually experience all that is shared by your friends and connections, as it happens. It also provides you with additional control by allowing you to filter what you see and from whom.

What could be considered the Wall 2.0 or quite simply, a personal or branded activity stream or timeline for people, public figures, and brands, the company is placing your in-network and external network activity at the front-and-center of your public profile for friends, associates, and followers to not only stay up to date with you aggregated Web activity, but also participate in the stream.

Essentially, Facebook channels all of your activity from the Conversation Prism (the social web) from networks such as Twitter, Last.FM, blog posts and comments, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, and all other services, including your in-network updates, into one timeline.

Perhaps whats most interesting, and truly indicative of the potential of the social graph and the relevant net, is the ability to extend “status” across multiple friend networks (friends of friends, or FoFs).

Source

Many suggest that Facebook’s new focus on the statusphere is a direct attempt to eradicate Twitter. And, with 175 million users compared to four million at Twitter, it might seem possible. I’m not so sure I agree however. Twitter is one of the most vibrant and unique online communities, micro or macro, that is creating its own ecosytem dubbed the Twitterverse.

I believe that FriendFeed is potentially at risk of stern competition as Facebook becomes continually pervasive. Over the last year, Facebook has integrated many features and capabilities made popular by FriendFeed. FriendFeed gained noteriety for offering Twitter users an alternative conversation platform that hosted threaded dialog around the disparate updates strewn across the social Web.

Designed to foster ongoing dialog, gestures such as “Liking” an update, commenting on status, and sorting updates by indivduals, are features that have also slowly rolled out on the Facebook platform. Robert Scoble has said that FriendFeed is Facebook’s R&D; department.

Conversations on Facebook will continue to increase in relevance and engagement between branded personalities, organizations and people as well as everyday people and their first-level of friends combined with the extended friends of friends network.

The question is, does Facebook’s new features impact or change where you or your contacts update status, respond, or participate in social timelines?

Related Posts on PR 2.0:
- Facebook and the Reality of Your Online Content
- The Socialization of Your Personal Brand
- In the Social Web, We Are All Brand Managers
- Is Twitter a Viable Conversation Platform?
- Facebook is the Hub for Your Personal Brand
- Facebook is a Beacon for Bad PR
- Mark Zuckerberg Listens and Responds to Beacon Crisis
- Beware the Things You Share in the World of Social Media
- The Essential Guide to Social Media
- The Art and Science of Social Media and Community Relations
- Lifestreams Channel Online Activity into One River of Relevance

He’s right.

According to Owyang (who’s a good friend, so it’s strange to refer to him in the AP format), has experienced 2,000 referrers from twitter to his blog in last 30 days. Obviously, it’s a very popular topic as his comments have skyrocketed to over 200 and it’s not slowing down.

Some conversations are also migrating to Facebook, Pownce, Jaiku, and across other social networks and micromedia communities. This movement represents a shift in where people congregate around the topics that are important to them and how they surround themselves with the people they feel are worthy of calling peers.

There’s no doubting its numbers though. For the right topic, Twitter is an incredible source of traffic.

The migration to shorter conversation bursts (140 characters or less on Twitter) is evolutionary and is also indicative of our insatiable appetite for both media snacking and also a sense of community. On any given day, I see more response in Twitter or Facebook than I do on PR 2.0 or bub.blicio.us. But that doesn’t mean that blogs are slowing down. It just represents that people share and discover things differently.

David Armano calls Twitter a conversation ecosystem. Indeed it is.

I call it a conversation.

And conversations are not unique to Twitter, it’s just one of the places where you can start and join discussions that matter to you. Conversation hubs are everywhere. That’s the entire foundation of Social Media. Twitter just happens to be the most popular microblogging network out there right now and it represents the first micromedia tool that will have mass appeal. But, depending on the market demographic and segment, those hubs are stationed across the Web.

I rely on Twitter to share content and listen to and participate in conversations that are distinct to its ecosystem. I also engage in other social networks and micromedia communities for the very same reasons. Each, in their own way, allow me to reach different groups of people and in turn, increase referrals.

Twitter is incredible tool for also listening. Outside of the inane updates, spam, or self promotion, which I choose to not follow, I learn about news, trends, important conversations, and new ideas. It’s fast, dynamic, and can be incredibly influential.

Bottom line is that Twitter is only growing in relevance regardless of whether you “get it” or not. And, it’s implications impact not just personal relationships, but also represent opportunities for businesses to engage.

Yes, not all conversations are worth your time, but then again, you don’t know until you watch and listen.

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce or Facebook.

Lifestreams are back in the spotlight again thanks to the most recent meme started by Steve Rubel, except this time, the popularity of flow, aka presence applications, such as Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and Tumblr is much greater and expansive than the last time the topic circulated the blogosphere.

As the idea starts to move along the bell curve, people are realizing the potential for aggregating information and broadcasting a focused channel of relevant content – on both sides of the pipe.

I’m surprised however, that several folks new to the subject are actually taking or accepting credit for being among the first to launch dedicated lifestreams. The truth is that lifestreams aren’t new at all. I’ve been writing about lifestreams and various platforms since 2006 and launched two separate experiments on Jaiku and Tumblr in early ’07, and I’m sure there are other edglings who can document their evolution well before that.

Back in February 2007, Emily Chang explored a series of options for manually creating a solution for aggregating content into one data river, “After a year and a half of using social applications heavily, I recently had to revisit the plan to aggregate all my activity into one data stream… kept wishing I could look at all my social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity, location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking about? I still had the urge to have an information and online activity mash-up that would allow me to discover my own patterns and to share my activity across the web in one chronological stream of data”

Her data stream is here.

Jeremy Keith wrote about “Streaming His Life Away” in November 2006, which also served as inspiration to Emily, “I’ve mocked up my own little life stream, tracking my Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, and blog posts. It’s a quick’n’dirty script that isn’t doing any caching. The important thing is that it’s keeping the context of the permalinks (song, link, photo, or blog post) and displaying them ordered by date and time.”

Stowe Boyd had this to say about data streams in response to Emily’s post, “…This traffic flow — made more liquid by RSS and instant messaging style real-time messaging — is the primary dynamic that I believe we will see in all future social apps. My sense is that small advances like Emily’s single stream represent the inchoate and pent-up need for a traffic and flow model to crystallize, and change the web, fundamentally.”

The difference today, however, is that the advantages of lifestreams are now more apparent in today’s social economy, setting the stage for adoption among the early market majority. Tools are readily available today that can create dedicated lifestreams with zero programming required.

RSS is the riverbed for data streams. It enables people to not only subscribe to content, but also to common topics, ideas, and interests. And, microblogs aka flow applications, are the new platforms that facilitate the broadcast of these streams by anyone, for everyone.

Lifestreaming, in essence, is a site dedicated to collecting and publishing online activity – all in one place. In its most basic definition, lifestreams are information aggregators that funnel RSS feeds to create a concentrated river, stream, or flow of life represented through content.

(c) Brian Solis

But it’s much more than narcissism and the belief that our thoughts and activities are so important that we are required to publish everything we do for you to follow.

This is about communication. It’s about people staying connected with each other in new ways that are radically different, but no less important, than the tools we used to keep in touch in the past. Remember, tools change…people don’t.

This is an extension of traditional one-to-one conversations allowing people to become their own information broadcast networks.

My lifestream on Jaiku

As discussed by several people over the last year, flow applications are also representative of something much more powerful than simple lifestreams.

The same technology can also create channels that broadcast ideas, topics, key words, tags, etc., creating a variety of streams that build channels around clusters of relevant information.

Steven Hodson of WinExtra is on the right track in his discussion on Ideastreams, “Currently tags are used as a link back to the Technorati service which allows you to see what other blogs out there might be using the same tag as a way to identify their posts…But they could very well form the basis of idea streaming if they were fully developed into a universal way to identify not just the topic or content of a post but also ideas or concepts brought about by the posts.”

Tags are one way to do it right now, however the folksonomy of tagging is far from perfect. Not everybody tags things the same way and in some cases many tag things incorrectly (which is an entirely different subject for another time).

There’s nothing stopping any person from creating topical or idea channels based on the power of people and day-to-day content review. For example, I am constantly reading about Social Media and therefore I could create and publish an idea or data stream based on the interesting things I find in social networks, blogs, and other online venues through a variety of social tools that will then send the filtered content to my platform of choice.

And aside from ideas, there are also incredible opportunities for data streams to connect people and communities together with flow.

For example, there are more and more companies, non profits, politicians, artists, and organizations participating in the world of Social Media everyday. They could each greatly benefit from collecting and broadcasting focused and comprehensive data streams to share activity with their community in ways that weren’t before possible.

The most exciting thing here is that lifestreams are gaining traction, but they are just the start. The capabilities and implications of lifestreams and data streams are wide and varied, left only to the imagination and vision of people to define and build. The evolution of these streams will continue to change, enhance, and extend how people communicate with other people. And, it allows everyone to share so much more than just words. Lifestreams and data streams are windows into the activity, communities, ideas, content, beliefs, passions, words, thoughts, and topics that help define who we are.

Recent posts on lifestreams:

Rich Mahn

Dan York

Josh Bancroft

David Armano

Rex Hammock

Fred Wilson

Click here to see a larger view of each screen shot.

For more on Tumblr and tumbelogs read my previous post at PR 2.0.

Connect on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce or Facebook.