Take Only Memories. Leave Only Footprints.

As our lives are being lived ever increasingly digitally, I often think about the electronic footprint I’m leaving behind for posterity.

In times past, loved ones passed on years of correspondence – old love letters, journal entries, notes in the margins of calendars – from which those left behind could construct the simulacrum of a life lived.

What are we leaving behind today? Arguably, a richer set of media in the form photos posted to Facebook or Instagram, high definition videos of every waking moment, blog posts strewn across the interwebs.

It is a paradoxically ephemeral – and yet, everlasting – legacy we are leaving behind.

Ephemeral in the sense that – should there be a catastrophe where everything electronically was wiped away in an eye blink – there would be nothing for future historians to decipher who we were as a people and as a race; and everlasting, in that as we share our digital periscopes, they are innumerably replicated across the world in countless nooks and crannies of the web, to the extent that anything we throw into the ether cannot be retrieved and re-bottled, even if we desired with all our hearts to do so.

We are living lives with fragmented attention spans, conflicting and constant demands on our time – but little time for reflection and “soak.”

All the while, we’re leaving millions of digital footprints, all with the potential to last forever, but the very real possibility of being swept away like sandcastles in the surf.

Here, at the beginning, we are only starting to come to grips with the ghosts we are leaving behind.

What will stand as our Ozymandias?

Keeping up with the Joneses

Gowalla has just implemented a new set of API calls for checkins.

Facebook is reportedly also very close to have a set of location specific API calls available soon.

Is Location in 2010 the Augmented Reality of 2009?

Feels like it.

Some Thoughts on Lifestreaming

There are so many cool life streaming content services available that do what they do extremely well: Utterz does a great job at recording and posting audio to your blog, Seesmic is great at video comments, Flickr is my tool of choice for sharing photos on the fly, and Qik is awe inspiring in terms of live video streaming from a cell phone.

You get the idea. Plenty of services to represent slices of your life, either from a browser, a phone, or a desktop application.

I know I am leaving out services like Plaxo, Social Thing! and FriendFeed, which I really think of as more aggregators than originators of content. Maybe others would call these services the lifestreaming services and the ones I call lifestreaming, microblogging services. Tah-may-toe, Tah- mah-toe.

And yet. There is not one killer lifestreaming application – at least in my humble opinion, gentle reader.

For me, the killer lifestreaming service will let me do the following:

• Let me post video
• Let me post photos
• Let me post audio
• Let me share web links
• Let me cross post to Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed, Social Thing!, Plaxo, Facebook, Pownce, etc.
• Support SMS and Mobile Platforms – from day one

And here is the kicker – allow me to do this – all of this – CONVENIENTLY, while events unfold, not having to sit down an hour later and pull all of these elements together hodge-podge at a desktop or laptop.

In short, I want to have the ability from a mobile device to capture and share events on the fly with rich content and no compromises.

Is that too much to ask?

We are really close to being there. I am impressed beyond words at what some of these services have been able to pull off. But we are not quite there – yet.

For now, I’ll keep looking for that killer service.