We’ve noted Facebook’s gradual crawl into the realm of lifestreaming – showing friends’ activities from outside services like YouTube, Flickr, and Delicious in your News Feed. Today, AOL’s $850 million social network Bebo is piling into the space too, with a slew of new aggregation features that build on the additions made back in December.
The big new twist on Bebo’s lifestreaming features is that it will automatically import all of your friends’ activity on the different services you register, even if those friends aren’t Bebo users. This functionality comes by way of Socialthing, the social aggregator that AOL acquired last summer, and is a similar but more automated concept to FriendFeed’s “imaginary friends.”
At launch, Bebo is offering support for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Delicious. That’s a smaller number of services than the competitors, but the company is hoping that with its unique ability to pull in activities from your disparate friends automatically, it can make up ground. Another way the company hopes to do that is by getting celebrities into lifestreaming – they tout the fact that a number of prominent artists like Miley Cyrus and All-American Rejects are already using the features.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Socialthing hadn’t even left private beta when it was purchased by AOL, but it did seem to make social aggregation a lot easier to get excited about, since it leveraged your existing social networks and didn’t entail having to find a whole bunch of new people to follow, ala FriendFeed. There’s also AIM integration coming, wherein AIM profiles become Bebo profiles, which could lure millions of new people into the site.
AOL and Bebo have a huge audience and in many ways a better, more mainstream take on an idea that has proven successful so far with early adopters. Will it be enough to get the masses into social aggregation and prove that AOL didn’t massively overpay for Bebo? Probably only if tens of millions of people cling to it, versus the hundreds of thousands that use existing social aggregators.
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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
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FriendFeed and 8 Other Lifestreaming Services
Bebo London Office (Video)
Bebo Partners with Yahoo Search: Acquisition Imminent?
AIM Adds Lifestreaming Features with BuddyUpdates
Current.tv in Bebo Deal
Bebo, Orange to Launch Bebo Mobile
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Via Mashable
Personal comment:
Les liens additionnels de l'article de Mashable pointent vers tout une série d'"aggrégateurs sociaux". C'est évidemment une nouvelle tendance pour tous les réseaux sociaux, nouvellement labellée "Lifestreaming". Toute sa vie, en stream et en ligne, pour ses "friends"!