Building a better lifestream

For this Ubuntu Developer Summit we tried a bit of an experiment; using whoisi to make a lifestream of what was happening at UDS. It is available here. Unfortunately some people found it difficult to use and didn’t really “get” how it worked. I was getting pretty good at it by midweek, I had been adding so many people that I had translated about a book’s worth of reCAPTCHAs.

About half-way through UDS we went to dinner at the Computer History Museum and I ended up talking about this whole lifestreaming thing with Aq. Two things came out of this discussion. First off, UDS seemed to be missing a “backchannel”, that subversive, honest stream of conversation you see on twitter during conferences. And two, whoisi is great, but for “normal people” who aren’t into this kind of thing, the barrier was too high. Ironically by “normal people” I mean Ubuntu Developers at UDS, heh.

So while I went back for seconds and ate lovely chocolate covered strawberries, Aq went back to the table and started hacking. (Yes, he brought his laptop to dinner at the computer history museum, go figure.)

So he hacked this together:

You can get the code like this, bzr branch lp:udstream … in that directory you will find the html file. Open it in firefox. Neat huh?

So here’s what I am thinking. The problem with whoisi and friendfeed is that everyone has to go set up their feeds and make the event and all this noise. I (think) I have a better idea. The other day Google asked me if I wanted to create a profile, and I did, and automatically it found my launchpad account, my picassa, my gmail, and my identi.ca account. Scariness aside, this was really useful to me. Mugshot also had this nice feature of letting you define all your social networking accounts and aggregating them all into one place (way before friendfeed was doing it).

So where am I going with this? I think it would be cool if launchpad had fields for things like your blog, your twitter/identi.ca, your flickr/picassa, etc. etc. This information would then be available via the Launchpad API thinger – along with the other things it provides. That way, the next time we have a UDS, Aq’s udstream basically just asks launchpad who signed up for uds-jaunty+1 and grabbed their info, and just constructed a life-lifestream right there on the spot. Or better yet longterm, it would be nice if launchpad just made a lifestream for every event people registered to using their information. (I can feel Joey firing off a mail asking me to file bugs). Users don’t have to do anything but keep their lp pages up to date and register for the event like they normally would – the software does the rest.

And why do I care about this so much? Having been to a UDS and then missing a few and then going back there’s always this of “I’m missing something” when you are not at a UDS. Microblogging and all this other web2.0 nonsense really do a good job at giving you a feel for the “vibe” at an event. Sure, having live video and audio is preferred, but there’s something to be said about the backchannel “wow, I don’t want to say this aloud but Jono’s idea is pure crack” kind of conversations that make it much more fun. I think having a realtime feed of microblogs, blogs, pics, and other stuff is worth looking into …

Oh dang, I nearly forgot what I was supposed to be blogging about. So anyway, Aq made this cool lifestream hack, if you want to help fix it so that we can have something better for the next UDS, I would appreciate it.