AOL Lifestream

» see lifestream.aol.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

aol lifestream never reached turkey at meaningful scale. by 2010 the aol brand had collapsed into a us nostalgia signal, and turkish broadband users were already on ttnet with msn open in one window and a facebook feed in the other. lifestream sat inside the aol desktop client, which was almost nobody's home page outside the united states by then.

the product was not new code. it was a rebrand of socialthing!, a small startup aol acquired in august 2008 with the same lifestreaming pitch friendfeed and jaiku had already made famous. once renamed, lifestream pulled in updates from third-party networks like twitter and youtube and assembled them into a single feed. it could also pick up digg activity and rss. you saw your own activity on one panel and your friends on another, with the whole thing stitched together by the aol login.

the timing was wrong. lifestreaming as a category was already losing oxygen to facebook's own news feed, which had become the default place where everyone's external activity quietly headed. aol shipped lifestream as defense against that gravitational pull. it never had the user base to fight back.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

at its plain mechanical level lifestream let you connect roughly twenty external services to your aol identity. you got a public profile page at lifestream.aol.com with aggregated activity. photos and videos uploaded directly to aol's storage. a buddy info link from aim pointed back at the same profile. the older aol pictures and aol hometown services had already collapsed by then. lifestream was the last aol product that hosted a profile page at all.

~ the decline ~

aggregator dashboards are a fragile business. they depend on the apis of upstream services that have their own incentives. twitter began closing down third-party access starting in 2011, and facebook never offered a clean read api in the first place. myspace was dying on its own. by 2013 lifestream's feed had thinned out enough that the page felt half-broken on a regular tuesday.

verizon bought aol in 2015 and started auditing the consumer property catalog for things to cut. lifestream was an easy mark. traffic was small and the storage costs from years of uploaded media kept growing, with no clear path to monetize the social graph it had accumulated.

~ the day it died ~

aol announced the shutdown in late january 2017. users were given one month to log in and download whatever photos and videos they had uploaded. on 24 february 2017 the profile pages went dark. the buddy info button in aol desktop stopped showing user profiles and opened to the aim home page instead. aol had finally exited the business of hosting a personal page on the public web.

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