Green Tea Ice Cream

What is it that these start-ups have against the letter “e”?

Anyway, whether you call it ambient intimacy or lifestream or flow (my own catch phrase - we all need a good catch phrase, right? - being the diaspora of you), a number of Web 2.0 start-ups are working to aggregate and mediate the socialisation of this loosely joined stream of personal information. The latest one I’ve stumbled across is iStalkr. I’m not sure about the slightly menacing concept behind the brand but their intent is to provide a visual representation of your lifestream (a little bit like Journal in Outlook, though I’ve admittedly never got the hang of that) through pulling together all your LastFM, twitter, RSS feeds etc into one coherent stream. Here’s mine, which looks a little empty right now. may I should get a life. Tumblr is another, simpler implementation of a similar concept but is less explicitly social.

iStalkr is still a little rough but the notion is interesting and I like the idea of people drawn to my (for example) recently displayed enthusiasm in obscure records released on Flying Nun (via LastFM) finding we have other interests in common. On the other hand, just how much of our lives do we want to live in public? And is it really anything different from the applications you can embed within the fast moving and ever-growing raptor that is Facebook? Or will there always be a need for slightly differentiated, boutique products like iStalkr, part of whose attraction will be their small, specialised scale. Also interesting to note that it’s another Australian launch, like Tangler [Actually, they're a gang of self-described geeks from Las Vegas. Maybe that explains the slightly fatalistic brand.]