What the rain knows

The first version of Nokia Lifeblog (see also Wikipedia: Nokia Lifeblog) seems to have been released sometime in the summer of 2004. Just a smidge less than two years ago, according to a press release on the Nokia site (New Nokia Lifeblog - the photo diary that writes itself dated March 8th, 2006), Nokia debuted version 2.0 at CeBIT. From the release:

As with previous versions of Nokia Lifeblog, you can create a rich personal multimedia diary, with photos, video clips, messages and text notes all stored in one place. With content organized in a chronological manner, it is easy to browse, search, view and share the content both on your mobile device as well as on a compatible PC. The new version of Nokia Lifeblog builds on the previous versions by adding audio notes as well as other valuable context information, such as calendar entries and location information, to the diary. This means that images and video clips are surrounded with the context in which they were taken, rendering them as part of the rich tapestry of items that make up your personal Nokia Lifeblog timeline.

With the new Nokia Lifeblog, your Nokia Nseries device can be set to immediately link your photos to information about your location, your calendar entries, and even what time it was. For example, if you used the calendar on your Nokia Nseries device to input an entry for CeBIT, photos taken during that time will be tagged with this information from your calendar, making them easier to find in the future.

I vaguely remember the flurry of blog posts following Nokia’s announcement of Lifeblog back in early 2004. At the time, I wasn’t using a Nokia phone and I was blogging using a homebrew CMS that I ended up using for a total of almost two years before switching to a version of Wordpress in 2005. Early in the same year, Agatha and I tossed out our old Motorola mobile phones and bought …. a pair of Motorola A1000’s.¹ In the summer of 2007, we went out and bought N95’s and have used them to take thousands of photos and record hundreds of video clips since then. A lot of the photos have found their way onto blogs and, if I were a Flickr user, all or some would have shown up there. Some of the videos have ended up on Youtube.

I have an N95. Agatha has one too. I blog and she has in the past, but neither of us have ever used Nokia Lifeblog. Why?

First of all, by the time that we bought the phones, I had long forgotten about Lifeblog and no one told us about it when we were making our purchase. I only rediscovered Nokia Lifeblog by accident because it was one of the other applications available on the install menu that showed up when I finally (after more than half a year) decided to install the PC Suite software. Up to that point, we’d been connecting our phones to our PCs as mass storage devices using the bundled USB cables. If I hadn’t wanted to do a firmware upgrade² , I might never have heard about it again.

I should have been sold on the wonders of Nokia Lifeblog by the sales staff at the electronics retailer where we bought the phones. OK, maybe that’s expecting a bit too much of Nokia (and the retailer). There should at least have been an attractive pamphlet/flyer about lifeblogging inside the box with my phone. It’s possible that there might have been something about Lifeblog that showed on the screen of each of our N95’s when we first switched them on, but I really doubt it because, the firmware update put my phone into “new phone mode” (all of the data on the phone had been erased, I had to change the language settings, the theme, etc.) and there wasn’t a peep about lifeblogging. For years now, I’ve been passing billboards for Nokia N-series handsets on a daily basis and have yet to see Nokia Lifeblog explicitly mentioned.

Worse yet, though there are a few out there if you specifically search for them, I can’t recall ever stumbling across someone’s Nokia-Lifeblog-powered lifeblog. I’m subscribed to hundreds of blog feeds (from sites dedicated to a wide range of topics as well as some that could probably be considered lifeblogs already) and none of them are from sites even partially updated using the Lifeblog software. There are a lot of people who email posts to their blogs or update them via the web browser on their phone (or, recently, using Twittr and similar services), but there seem to be very few people using Lifeblog either from their phones or from their PC’s to maintain their blogs.

Nokia even seems to be trying to hide Lifeblog - the 20.0.015 firmware update moved the Lifeblog icon down into Applications/Media where, before, it had been directly under Applications. When I started up the Lifeblog app on my phone for the first time, the message that greeted me told me that I could find out more about it at www.nokia.com/nseries/lifeblog, but visiting that address yields an error page and I get redirected to nokia.com. The working URL is www.nokia.com/lifeblog, but that redirects to one of nokia.com’s wacky, impossible-to-remember numeric URL’s.

Part of the issue may be that they seem to have locked themselves into, from the beginning, a partnership with SixApart’s Typepad service:

To get started, register for a TypePad weblog account using the Lifeblog application on your phone or sign up on the Net from your PC. (See Lifeblog weblog partners below.)

Nokia Lifeblog: Lifeblogging Is the Best Blogging

If there’s some sort of agreement that makes Typepad’s relationship with Nokia Lifeblog exclusive, then Nokia made a huge mistake. They should have forged relationships with all of the major blog hosting services (in 2004, in addition to Typepad, there were, iirc Wordpress.com and pre-SixApart-acquisition Livejournal, among others) and worked with developers to provide plugins for the blogging applications that can be self-hosted (like MovableType, Wordpress, etc.). They do provide documentation for the protocol that Lifeblog uses (based on the Atom API), in the form of a 17-page PDF, linked from the same page: Lifeblog Posting Protocol Specification (PDF file, 177 KB). That’s not enough, though.

I only know that Lifeblog can be used with non-Typepad services and software because I looked at the Wikipedia page. Where’s the Nokia-run Lifeblog community site with forums and Nokia employees chiming in with news and assistance for users trying to get Lifeblog working? There’s not even anything like the list on the Wikipedia page anywhere at nokia.com. In the case of Wordpress (the default option for blogging on one’s own hosting at this point), there are no Nokia Lifeblog plugins listed on the official Wordpress plugins site (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and the only Wordpress plugin available at all (the one linked from the Wikipedia page) was released more than a year ago and support, such as it is, seems to be being handled in the comments section of a blog post (Post to WordPress Blogs from Nokia Lifeblog). About half of the comments are from people saying that they’re not able to get it working.

That’s not the plugin author’s fault, by the way. He’s an individual, not receiving any recognition or help from the Nokia for the plugin work that they should be supporting wholeheartedly. What a thankless job that’s got to be.

If anyone with decision-making power at Nokia is listening: you should immediately start a crash program to raise Lifeblog’s profile, make it easier to use Lifeblog to post to blogs hosted by as many of the major service providers as possible, and pay the salaries of some developers within each community to produce plugins for at least the most commonly used blogging tools.

The idea of Lifeblog is great but it seems to be mostly gathering dust.

Update (several hours later)

I’ve just discovered Nokia Share Online. Share Online also happens to be a top-level menu item within the Applications folder on my newly-firmware-updated N95. Clicking on it takes me to a menu that offers me icons for three service providers Flickr, MySinaBlog, and Vox (another SixApart service). Next to each is the phrase “Ready for activation”.

Accessing the Options menu while inside the Applications/Share online folder gives me a contextual menu that includes options for “Add new account” and “add new provider”.

Share Online is currently at version 3.0 (released October 5th 2007 and last updated on January 25th 2008) as a Nokia Beta Labs project (list of Nokia Beta Labs apps). At least one person asked (in the comments on the Oct. 5th Nokia Beta Labs blog post Share Online 3.0 launched at Nokia Beta Labs, tell us what you think!) for a comparison of Share Online to Lifeblog but didn’t seem to get an official response.

Now I’m wondering whether development of Nokia Lifeblog will continue or if it’s already dead in the water (seems to be the case) and anyone who wants to blog from their phone is supposed to use Nokia Share Online.

1. For the record, the PC software bundled with the A1000 sucks/ed, but I still miss the touchscreen, the better voice quality when using speaker phone, and the ability to switch to speaker immediately once a call has been initiated rather than having to wait several seconds until the speaker option shows up at the bottom right of the phone’s screen. Obviously, though, I care more about the camera resolution and the ability to take surprisingly good video than about having a touchscreen. [↩]
2. I discovered later that this would require a separate download from the Nokia site. [↩]