Tumble into a (Life) stream
This link is to what is known as a lifestream (it happens to be my lifestream at Tumblr, although I haven’t added many streams to it as yet). Word Spy defines a “lifestream” as:
An online record of a person’s daily activities, either via direct video feed or via aggregating the person’s online content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos.
Various tools exist through which you can create your own lifestream. The Lifestream Blog has created a nice long list of these tools with examples, some reviews, and links to the home pages of the sites. While I recently started using Tumblr, you can see that many options exist. Jaiku, having recently been acquired by Google, is likely to be another service to watch. As others have pointed out, Tumblr is noteworthy for its simplicity (see melange’s Tumblr, a Different Way to Blog for a well-written post with links to other posts pertaining to Tumblr’s offerings).
As with other lifestream offerings, Tumblr enables users to specify social media services that they use—such as del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, LastFM, Twitter, YouTube, and personal blog(s)—and to output those feeds together all in one place. Basically, where a feed exists, you can have it display on Tumblr.
Any changes you make to any of the services you have included into your lifestream—adding a link to del.icio.us, updating your Facebook status, writing a new blog post—will be reflected in your stream. A lifestream service such as Tumblr exists to aggregate your content into your own customized stream of information.
You can also add content directly to Tumblr that will not be fed in from any of the other services you have linked to your Tumblelog. For this purpose, Tumblr offers seven types of posts: text (title and body), photo (browse for file or add URL and caption), quote (quote and source), link (title and URL and description), chat (title and dialogue), audio (file and description, limit one per day), and video (embed or upload file and caption). The Tumblr bookmarklet (accessible via your Dashboard under Account–Goodies) makes it quick, easy, and painless to add content that you tumble upon to your Tumblelog.
Tumblr offers other customizations (e.g., change the theme, have your URL point to a domain other than tumblr.com) as well as social features (e.g., follow others, be followed, create a group). Tumblr can be used for a wide variety of intents and purposes. Some users have migrated their sites over to Tumblr (e.g. the Rocketboom blog (http://www.rocketboom.com/blog/) has moved to a new Tumblr platform at http://rocketboom.tumblr.com/); others use their tumblelogs as a supplement (e.g., me).
Regardless, Tumblr does provide an easy way to record and aggregate online activity. I’m finding it useful for including information I run across that I don’t necessarily want to mention or discuss on my main site, but that I still find interesting enough that I’d like to include said information in my tumbles.
For more-detailed looks at lifestreams in general and Tumblr in particular, see the following posts:
LifeHacker’s Gina Tripani: Instant, no-overhead blog with Tumblr
Melange: Tumblr, a different way to blog
The Butter Room’s Todd Wickersty: Tumblr 101
ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus: Lifestreaming: a ReadWriteWeb Primer
Wikipedia: Tumblelogs
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