Following up on my Personal Aggregator (lifestream) dissing of the other day, here’s what I’d prefer to see (I should note that none of these ideas are original, and for most of my audience probably hark back to 2001):

Humans are interested in conversation. Conversation is what drives us. The things I want to see in a stream are places where I’ve previously entered into a conversation, either by starting a new conversation or by replying to someone else, and there have been responses which I’ve not yet read.

Some examples of this: comments on my blog posts, comments on blog posts which I’ve also commented on, comments on my Flickr photos, comments on Flickr photos which I’ve also commented on, emails, web pages marked as “for:pip” in del.icio.us, personal twitter messages (both direct messages and @pip), and so on.

After those items, I’m next interested in the conversations going on around me. That is to say, things that people I know are doing . This is where personal lifestreams can play a part – I’d want a feed from each person’s stream which I can then merge and create an contacts’ lifestream from. These activities also contain an inherent interest value. For example, blog posts and Flickr photos are almost always more interesting than twitter udpates which don’t really contain much value for me.

So let’s just review some of this, and see what we can do:

My Immediate Planet:

• comments on my blog posts: gmail-created feed available
• other blog comment replies: cocomment feed available
• twitter @pip: no direct feed, can filter normal twitter feed
• twitter inbox: no feed
• flickr comments: feed available
• flickr comment replies: feed available
• for:pip in del.icio.us: feed available

Friends’ Planet:

• blogs: feed available
• flickr contacts’ photos: feed available
• del.icio.us network: feed available
• twitter: feed available
• tumblr: feed available
• last.fm: feed available
• etc.

All of this is, of course, separate and additional to attention-data maintained resources.