To Many Social Networks?

I don't know if this makes me unusual in the eyes of the masses, but I have more than one social network. I am a posting member of Facebook, Twitter!, MySpace, Gowalla, Digg, and Stumbler. That's a lot of stuff to keep track of, and it was sort of a headache to keep track of each of these websites individually. That is why, when I heard of Lifestream beta for the Android, I rushed to the Android Market to check it out.

Now, if you have a phone that uses MotoBlur, such as the Devour or Backflip, then you may not find this application to be particularly useful, although I believe that Lifestream aggregates more social networks than the Motorola OS does. Lifestream is a social network aggregator, or an app that pulls updates from your various social networks and displays them in one area. It is also capable of posting updates on particular networks to your other social networks.

When you first start the Lifestream application you are given the choice of creating a Lifestream account, or just logging in with your Facebook account. After you log in you will be able to go to the Me section of your Lifestream, add whatever social Networks that you are using, and begin posting! Lifestream is able to link to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Digg, Foursquare, Delicious, Flikr, and YouTube, and pretty much everybody that I know has an account on at least one of these networks.

You can also search for locations and people to follow on the actual Lifestream network, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of action going on there.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that this is the beta version of Lifestream, and so it is still a little buggy. I have noticed that, sometimes, all of the comments that have been made to your posts don't show, and that the icons that show who made different posts are sometimes incorrect. Also, after you use Lifestream on your Android to check updates or post to numerous sites at once, please remember to use an application such as Taskiller to close out the the Lifestream application. If you don't, since Lifestream is constantly checking multiple social networking sites for updates, your battery will suffer a very quick and painful death, leaving you without a phone.

Overall, the Lifestream application is a very good concept, and, once it gets out of beta, I have high hopes for it, but, at the present, it is still useful for doing a quick check of all of your social networks at once.

Lifestream is produced by AOL, they have a web presence in addition to their application offering, and their app is available on the iPhone as well.