knowledgeer-at-large

I’d like to use the latest runaway trend to challenge a well worn “truth” in the software/technology development industry; “to best achieve success, just solve a problem you are personally experiencing.”

The pervasive wisdom goes, that your problem will virtually always be shared by others, perhaps many others and by simply solving that problem, you will have created a satisfied market.  My issue here is the rationalization of “simply solving” -gets- “satisfied market.”

In this case, I’d like to concentrate on the runaway trend is called “Lifestreaming.”

The developers of solutions that are characterized as “lifestreaming” have most definitely identified a nearly universal problem.

**Problem Backdrop** Information proliferation has been both the intention and the unintended consequence of the web since its inception.  A basic web premise has always been to serve as a means to provide more and more timely information to those who would seek it.  However, nearly everyone who has made use of the web over the past 4-5 years has experienced some amount of information overload.  Even if you just use email, chances are your quantity of messages have grown by the propmts of freely flowing information being processed by those you would send their messages to you.  And, if you are participating in the social networking phenomenon then the information flow has really gone into hyperdrive. What may have seemed overwhelming to give personal attention to when the scope was dozens has become mentally disorienting in the new scope of hundreds and even thousands of information blurbs we are exposed to/consume each day.**

The problem in this case is clear.  The combined web technologies to this point; portals, content development systems, weblogs, social-net personal page sites (facebook/myspace/linkedin), content tagging aggregators (del.cio.us/flickr), etc. have been too successful at providing more and more highly qualified and valuable information which are each desirable but collectively amount to too much information from too many disparate sources.

And, in this case, the solution(s) would seem just as clear. With the advent of XML content aggregator standards & technologies such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Atom Syndication Protocols, Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) and others, the informational content/context can both be selectively isolated and automatically be delivered to a number of reading devices.  However these underlying standards though required, are not enough to truly “manage” the overwhelming quantities most people and hence software developers are experiencing.  So, as a means to manage these info aggregation flows some developers are “solving the problem” by developing tools which combine to form a new class of solutions called “lifestreams.”

Lifestreams is a new and exploding market as evidenced by Josh Catone’s post in ReadWriteWeb earlier this year:  35 Ways to Stream Your Life.   In his post, Josh shares 35 such lifestream tools from several differing technology spaces such as microblogging, aggregator/readers etc.  The point being that there were so many entrants into the space that there were sure to be issues.  This has been amplified by the raw numbers of tools mentioned in the comments to the post identifying almost as many lifestream tools/vendors that Josh missed!

I’ve looked at some of these tools.  Though some seem better to me than others, most are very adequate at answering the problem they set out to answer; info overload.  Many (in my opinion, too many ) are being backed by venture capital and are becoming more established.  And these venture capital folks and the developers themselves have followed that prevailing wisdom to find a market by solving a problem they personally experienced.

From my perspective, I can’t help but feel that the prevailing wisdom is highly suspect here.  To me the solutions these develops are putting out are answering the problem, but the problem (information overload) was cast too shallow and now the solutions are left to be too superficial.

Yes, I know about info overload from my own experience.  Its overwhelming.  But I have also seen the effects of other reasonable market initiatives that seeming answer a problem in a very direct way that in hindsight were not broad enough to encompass the “context” of the problem.  I would count the rise and fall of knowledge management as such a market trend.

The proof will show itself as this “market” shakes out.  There will undoubtedly be a lot of wrecks in this overly crowded space.  The question for me however is “Will the Lifestream market itself last?”

I have my own ideas… What say you?