I thought AOL was one cancer that had been eliminated some time ago, but I guess I was wrong, but like cancer we have only been in remission and now it has metastasized!
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
AOL’s Lifestream is a service that lets you track activity from a number of social networks all from one place. You can link your Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Foursquare, Digg, Delicious, and AOL accounts to Lifestream and track the latest updates from your contacts or update your status on one or more of those services from a central location.
In other words, Lifestream is a lot like Friendfeed. Except it’s run by AOL, not Facebook. And so you can login with an AOL Instant Messenger account and see your AOL contacts status messages (which is sort of an awkward social networking feature, because you can reply to their status/away messages from Lifestream, but you can’t initiate a chat).
Lifestream started out its life… stream, as a web site. But today AOL launched an Android application, with an iPhone app expected soon. Actually, the Lifestream web site says the iPhone app is available now, but the download link wasn’t working for me.
The Android version of Lifestream offers most of the features found on the web site. You can see the latest updates from your contacts, update your status, or search for messages from people who aren’t in your contact list.
There’s also a “Discover” tab in the Android app, that you can use to search or browse your favorite messages or view trending topics. These trends show up in the sidebar of the Lifestream web site, but in order to save space in the mobile app, they’ve been moved to a different window.
Lifestream for Android is available from the Android Market. The iPhone app should be available from the iTunes App Store soon.
