Lazyfeed: ideastreaming comes to a web near you

Ideastreaming is a concept that I first wrote about back in August 2007 in response to Steve Rubel talk about lifestreaming. My idea at the time was rather than getting sucked into the whole idea that we needed to unify all our individual online rambling we needed a mechanism by which we could create a constant flow of the conversations that was happening around ideas and concepts.

What I thought at the time was that the idea method to do this was by using something that all blogs already provided as identifiers – that being tags.

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. In this rudimentary fashion they do their job but past Technorati and only being able to list tag linked blogs they really are pretty useless.

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. This is where Technorati could have really shined and truly provided a service beyond the scope of search engines.

I followed this up with another post on the subject in July of this year after the implementation of the real-time web hit.

While I may not be the biggest proponent of the real-time web I do see many areas where it could actually be invaluable. I know that if I had some way to create the ideastreaming that I envision there is no doubt that the real-time web could make it an incredibly powerful way to follow the conversation flow around ideas.

The whole premise of the real-time web is that it is able to bring the information to us as soon as it happens rather than us having to spend valuable time hunting for the starting threads of what might be happening, or what is being said.

Ideastreaming is a concept I really believe in and one that I think has the potential to make a big difference in how we deal with the ever increasing amount of information that is being created every minute of the day.

Now I remember when Louis Gray first mention a new service called Lazyfeed which was in closed beta at the time of his post but I didn’t really pay any attention to it. Then today he posted that the service had left its closed status and was available to everyone. At first I was ready to file it away as something to check out in the future, then I spotted where Louis mentioned in the post about how Lazyfeed could deliver results based on tags.

That got my attention and once I had taken care of a couple of things I headed over to the site to have a look for myself. After getting all signed up I went about starting to add tags that I wanted Lazyfeed to start keeping me updated on.

It is still early days for the service but I can tell it is one I am going to keep using because it lets me do something that I have wanted to do for a long time – be constantly updated on things I am interested in rather than having to wait for it to possibly come my way as it does now via things like Twitter, RSS feed etc.

The one big thing I would like to see though is to see the real-time update also update the actual “Latest Stuff about …” list that I am looking at when new stuff comes in rather that updating the tag list on the right. The other thing I would like to see as well is an API that developers can access because I would love it if I could use the client I use for Twitter and Facebook could also display my Lazyfeed items as well (how about bdule team?).

Nice job Lazyfeed – you have a regular user as of today, not to mention that it’s gratifying to see something I had thought would be a good idea come to life.