Social Media: AOL Almost Hits a Homerun with Lifestream

AOL hasn’t made any major buzz since making their services free to everyone. The fact is, they seemed to flounder after that move. As the SocialMediaSphere evolved at lightning pace, and Google bent over backward trying to develop apps that people would like and use, AOL fumbled the ball with trying to make themselves more like MySpace. The aborted attempt was hindered by the slow pace of development of their social pages, the limited features, and the difficulty in setting up a decent looking page. If they hadn’t such a hold on the email traffic of the world, their company might have died a slow death.

For a while AOL stuck with what they knew, email services. While they did this they developed firm advertising support wrapped around some pretty good news services. Now AOL is stepping out into the SocialMediaSphere again with a new app, Life Stream and it looks like they made it to third base with this one.

Integrated into their chat app, AIM, Lifestream allows you to consolidate many of the popular social media feeds, like Facebook and Twitter in one rolling real time feed. You can also share photos, YouTube videos and Del-icio-us bookmarks. Not only can you read your feeds gathered into one place, you can post to all of them at the same time and comment on your friends’ posts. Since it is combined with AIM, you can switch back and forth from private to public and conversations in the same place.

Where AOL runs short of a home run is the lack of an easy interface like a button to gather new buddies into your AIM account for private chats. While you can import your email contacts into your buddy lists, you can’t do the same for your Facebook Friends or Twitter followers. Nor do they offer a way to invite people to do so. Without an easy incentive to invite people to reach across the social media streams people just won’t, leaving AOL all dressed up and nowhere to go. Sounds like someone needs to get cracking on creating a code that would create a button that sends an email to your AOL account. Are you listening AOL?

Why Technorati Now Disappoints

While it is often said, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, Technorati’s new business plan cries out for a critique. Once the Mecca of blogging enthusiasts across the net, systemic changes to social media site Technorati’s mission has inexorably altered the role it will play in the blogosphere.

Technorati was once the place where a new blog could get listed, have its feeds pulled, and have a chance at developing an audience. In addition, links to the blog site would be listed, building what Technorati called “authority” on its pages. It was a level playing field for all bloggers.

Now Technorati has rolled out a new game plan, one of which new blogs are definitely not a part despite Technorati’s glowing description of the new roll out. Gone is the option to “ping” your content to show up on Technorati’s feed. RSS feeds exist for only those blogs with larger authority. And in the new rollout, many blogs with established authority found those numbers disappeared from their listing. If you score low on authority your content will be pinged every month or so from Technorati itself. Where once links has a shelf life of six months on Technorati for authority scoring purposes, now the shelf life is a single month. In a business where blogs can be birthed and wither within that time frame from a lack of readership, Technorati will hardly be helpful to a new blogger and present bloggers with smaller authority are not being served as well. The only blogs that continue benefit from being listed on Technorati are established blogs with an authority ranking above 100.

As new bloggers look for options in building readership, Technorati might just find itself not just in the cold, but frozen out of dynamic new offerings by the narrowing of their vision.