14 DAY TRIAL // Aol has been working on Lifestream for quite a while now. The social web aggregation service has been integrating it with its various other products. It started out in AIM, one of the two IM services Aol runs, and, recently, it made its way into AOL Mail. Now, though, it’s shedding its shackles and becoming a stand-alone product, not tied up to any Aol service or even an Aol account.
“In an age where users are completely inundated with information online, Lifestream is all about creating a unique and simple experience where you can view all of your social content and status updates in one place,” Brad Garlinghouse, president of Consumer Applications at Aol, said. “To date, nobody has done this well and we think it’s a huge opportunity for AOL to surprise our consumers and the industry at large with an incredibly compelling social experience.”
Aol Lifestream is now accessible over at lifestream.aol.com, but it's also available for mobile devices. It's actually a pretty solid product, one that others have been trying to pull off for a while now. It enables users to get access to updates from their friends over a big number of social networks and services, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, YouTube and plenty of others, the latest additions being MySpace and Foursquare, the popular location game/iPhone app.
However, with Lifestream, users are also able to publish status updates to any of the supported services, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, or to all of them at once. Interestingly, with the new mobile apps for the iPhone and Android devices, users can also add location data to their updates. Finally, Aol is doing what plenty of others have been lately, it's integrating Facebook Connect with the service. Users will be able to log in with their Facebook credentials, so using Lifestream doesn't even require an Aol account.