I feel old. Looking at AOL's new Lifestream service, which lets you see all your pals' Facebook and Twitter and FriendFeed status updates in addition to whatever they're up to on AIM, I'm thinking, isn't this how we got those services in the first place, when we all decided that status messages were the most useful aspect of instant messaging clients?

I'm pretty sure that's how it all came to pass, and thus AIM Lifestream is giving your reviewer a nasty case of the deja vu. Or are those just flashbacks to the Flock sidebar? The new functionality -- available as a Web application or in AIM 7 for Windows, AIM for Mac 2.0, and AIM Windows Mobile, just released as beta -- allows you to monitor Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, and YouTube activities amongst your cronies. Some of the most popular functions on those services has made the leap; for instance, Facebook's "Like" option for flagging other people's updates makes an appearance in the Web version.

We chose to test the Web version of Lifestream. Adding our Twitter information was in theory as simple as permitting an OAuth confirmation, but we found some weirdness in the system afterward, when clicking the Twitter option under My Profiles took us to a mysterious Twitter account we've never seen before for "Laina Bibb." Who is she and why hasn't she tweeted since mid-April? We have no idea. As for Facebook, our installation process in Chrome simply gave up the ghost midway through; we had to switch over to Firefox to complete that process. The My Profiles link for Facebook worked fine.

Once that process was complete, updates and those of our friends were retrieved with no trouble, though we noticed a 30-minute lag in updates; anything over 15 minutes is, frankly, unacceptable for following a service that updates in real time. We saw no way in settings to control the frequency of updates. Time stamps were a bit disconcerting as well; for various reasons AIM thinks your review is on the East Coast, and there's no way to convince Lifestream otherwise.

A simple set of tabs differentiates between your updates and everyone else's, and though one can't currently pass updates back to Twitter or the other services, the update from those sites to our Lifestream seemed to be fairly thorough, though slow. It's unclear at this time whether Lifestream might be prone to dropping tweets, a notorious problem with some of the third-party readers for that service. Overall, as a status monitor it's very similar to that offered by Flock, without the annoying Flock default of showing only the most recent update from each person you follow.

AOL's been looking to regain its footing in the messaging realm -- for the purposes of discussion here, let's treat Twitter and other status-update services as forms of messaging -- ever since they picked up the lifestream-and-social-networking-aggregator socialthing in 2008 and Bebo (big in Europe!) the year before that. In the broader picture, the need for some reliable, comprehensive social-network aggregator is clear, and AIM just might have the reach to accomplish that.

But Lifestream's got a lot of beta-ism to work through for now. AOL learned long ago that simply flinging its users into the maw of the Internet is dangerous for both them and the net. One hopes that tech glitches such as the lack of timely updates will be addressed even before cool-but-optional such as two-way updates between Lifestream and the non-AOL services, however crucial those might seem to the brass at AOL who very, very much want to be back on top of the status-message heap.