An increasing number of people blog, add to their facebook page, twitter, and post pictures to document their entire life, and they call it Lifestreaming. It seems like an unstoppable trend. In the future it is likely that we will have phones or similar devices that do record an entire life. Be afraid, be very afraid, and amazed, and curious, and productive. Here at Assembla we are looking at a similar trend that I call Workstreaming. The goal of Workstreaming is to share what you are working on, so that you can work more effectively with your team members. In Assembla, we provide email, RSS, and Web views of Alerts, our list of Workstream activity. As Lifestreaming and Workstreaming infrastructure improves, we should be able to provide a much more connected team experience.

Already, your phone will track where you are.  Customers have asked me for this kind of tracking for their team members. 

Typical workstream events include code commits, comments, wiki edits, ticket edits, and chat. We get all of those things inside Assembla spaces. However, we are taking Workstreaming serious, so we are also developing tools to suck in information from other systems.

What about sharing the other way? I have been asking myself if we can take Workstream data and feed it into the Lifestreaming infrastructure. Can we put your workspace activity on your Facebook page? Unfortunately, the permissioning does not match. A user owns his or her own Lifestream data and can decide what friends to share it with. When the user is working in a team project, the project owner or funder controls this information, and may not want to share it with the same friends.

We can share events from public spaces in the Lifestreaming infrastructur, and we will do that. However, 90% of our projects are private. So, we will need to work on permissioned ways to share that.