As you may know, Steve Rubel has ceased publishing his long-tenured blog Micropersuasion in favor of using the lifestreaming application Posterous. According to Steve, lifestreaming is where it's at, and I've no reason to argue otherwise.
If that's truly the case, where does that leave the rest of us?


Steve has admitted he's out on the bleeding edge because his clients expect it of him. To the contrary, a lot of the people I deal with everyday are no where near it. For some, even blogging is still new.
While part of me wants to join Steve in his edgecrafting exploits, I realize the need to maintain a more balanced perspective. I've decided to incorporate lifestreaming into my publishing mix using Friendfeed as my primary source for aggregating content. But, I'm still going to blog long-form at The Social Media Handyman site and here on Marketing Profs Daily Fix.
Posterous and Tumblr
I'm also experimenting with Posterous and Tumblr, using them as tributaries that feed into the river of content that is Friendfeed. While I try to keep the handyman blog very topically-centric, Posterous is my "everything else" blog. When I find something I want to talk about that doesn't fit elsewhere, Posterous is where it ends up.
Apps like Posterous and Tumblr fill a void between long-form and micro-blogging. They are "dress casual" in the sense that posting can go both ways. Plus, content can be exported to other sites, such as your blog or Twitter. They remind of the days when blogging was much more extemporaneous. (I called it "shoot from the hip, speak from the heart" kind of publishing.) With apps like these, in a sense what's old is new again.
Personally, this form of publishing meets a real need for me at this point in my blogging journey. I'm not prepared to go as far with it as Steve, but I like the off the cuff stuff too. Twitter, with its character limits, doesn't always fit the bill.
Lifestreaming in the Marketing MIx
I'm often asked what's the next big thing. Occasionally, I run across skeptics who question why we should invest so much time and energy on the latest crazes like Facebook and Twitter when, possibly, something else is just around the corner. I believe lifestreaming is that something else, a further amplification of that which we're already experiencing via Facebook's newsfeed and the Twitter stream.
What are the implications for marketing you might ask? A couple of things come to mind:
Brand monitoring - How valuable could all this data be to retailers? In September 2008, blogger Michael Fruchter hinted at its importance:

"I was thinking about all the data we lifestream. What does this data say about us? How valuable is this data in the right corporation's hands? Bookmarks are very telling of a individuals mindset, habits, and interests. The same interpretations can be made about the data we lifestream. A person's digital fingerprint is a potential gold mine of data for various industries."

Brand engagement - Not only could brands use this lifestreaming data to ascertain consumer behavior, likes/dislikes, even buying behavior, it's a good fit for any company who produces a large volume of content themselves.
In his latest post, Fruchter talks about one such company, Dairy Queen, that now has a Friendfeed room. "The offical Dairy Queen room will be used to aggregate Dairy Queens blog posts, tweets, pictures and videos," says Fruchter.
Should marketers be concentrating on lifestreaming to the extent that futurists like Steve Rubel (and Robert Scoble) are? I don't think so. Our hands are already full with blogs, Internet video, podcasting, online communities, social networks and micro-blogs. That doesn't mean we exempt ourselves from paying some attention though. As the old saying goes, "the only constant is change" and, sooner or later, lifestreaming will make its way to the forefront and we need to be prepared for when it does.
(UPDATE: Little did I know when I wrote this post what was about to happen just around the corner. Yesterday's announcement that Facebook has acquired Friendfeed has changed the game completely and immediately. Everyone's attention is on lifestreaming right now. To quote Steve Rubel, "Lifestreaming is going mainstream." Like it or not, we're entering the age of the lifestream alright, and in a much bigger way than I ever could have realized.)
How about you? How does lifestreaming fit into your publishing paradigm and/or marketing mix? Is it something we need to be paying particular attention to at this time?
What are your thoughts on Facebook's acquisition of Friendfeed? What are the implications?