Once it becomes ‘the year of [something]‘ what was truly new & vibrant & interesting about that [something] has moved on down the road.  So it is with our year of lifestreaming.  Forgive me for thinking there isn’t a whole lot of life in lifestreams.  Dumb rivers of updates are a stop gap, surely better than what we had before (no centralized method for keeping watch) but not a durable solution for user or service value.  These dim aggregations cloak beautiful seams.  The next round of really interesting personal informatics services won’t have any hestitation over being made up of bits & seams.  A la Dopplr, they’ll strut about in a suit made of many services.

What’s interesting about our current round of science projects is the glue that holds them together.

Or, rather, what you could do if you started to really think about the various forms of data glue you could give your users.  Post It Notes use weak adhesive to make your information surface mobile and the medium more plastic.  Let’s not get hung up on form factors, but intstead look to the deeper needs this rash of feature copying is trying to meet.

• How can we centralize management of all these disparate personal points on the Web?  (Blog It, ping.fm)
• How can we easily view the activities that matter to us?  (FriendFeed,  SocialThing, Netvibes)
• How can we round up our publishing efforts and present various views of what we are up to?  (See Loic’s plaint, Mike’s extented discussion of the centralized Me, ‘enhanced’ Facebook Mini-Feed, FriendFeed, Action Streams)

By fixating on one or two specific types of data views (status messages, ‘life’ streams) we miss the larger point.  Adam Greenfield isn’t wrong when he notes that our current social software offerings are weak simulacra of the rich interplay we enjoy in our ‘real’ lives.  We aren’t going to give people richer experiences by mimicking a narrow range of interface ideas.

Instead, we should help people curate and cultivate their social lives.  Let them go granular, reuse bits, and, most importantly, remix and reglue those bits in contextually powerful ways.  Such nuance is likely to come from users.  We, in turn, should pledge to pave the cow path experiences they dictate.  Ma.gnolia’s announcement to go all 3rd party for its ID system wasn’t merely about championing OpenID.  The bookmarking service will also let users rely on their existing Facebook accounts for login and profile credentials and contact lists.  What is exciting about what Larry’s team is doing is that they are getting out of the identity game and focusing their scarce resources on a richer sandbox experience.

Or, rather, with all this stuff in one place, now what?