Many Internet-users today have user-generated content spread across several different social networking and review sites. It would be helpful to find all of a user’s public content displayed on one page in one timeline.
A similar concept called “nameplate sites” already exists. However, nameplate sites are only pages with links to a user’s various internet profiles and pages. They do not aggregate the posted content and show it in a blog format.
The “Life Blog” concept is a hub page for a person’s entire online presence. It looks just like a regular blog, but it pulls most of its content from other websites. It is a timeline of posts from several social media sites, review sites, and online apps aggregated into one page, with the most recent activity displayed first. With a Life Blog, you can see all of a person’s most recent Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube posts all in one place. Besides social networking sites, the Life Blog can also show a person’s recent forum postings, blog posts, blog comments, Amazon reviews, Yelp reviews, IMDB reviews, and accomplishments from various games and apps.
Creating a Life Blog should be a simple process very similar to setting up a WordPress blog. Once you create an account, you can customize the appearance of the page and add basic information. The next step is to link all relevant sites to the Life Blog. You will be presented with a list of all supported sites (Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc.) from which to choose. After making selections, you will have to provide any information required to pull content from the sites (such as URLs and account names). After everything is set up, the feeds from all linked sites will be aggregated into one feed, similar to how RSS aggregators combine blog posts and news from many different sources.
On the back-end, this can probably be accomplished using the public APIs available from most major social media sites. If no API is available for a website, it may be possible to scrape the content with a crawler bot. It is also worth exploring if the Life Blog concept can be implemented as a WordPress plug-in (or a series of WordPress plug-ins).
Do you know if this concept has been implemented before? Let me know in the comments.
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