Lifecasting's the extreme sport of oversharing. With cheap webcams and broadband available, it was only logical that the attention-seekers among us — most people under the age of 30, in other words — would start broadcasting themselves online, 24/7. It's not for everyone — Julia Allison, the New York dating columnist, claims to lifecast, but her sporadic videos don't even come close to the full-time lifecaster's output.

What's less explicable is why anyone, on either side of the camera, thought they could make money off the practice. A cottage industry of startups — Ustream.tv, Justin.tv, Kyte, Mogulus, and so on — sprang up around the naive belief that where there's a screen, there's an audience to sell. Even Yahoo got into the business. The hype fueled lifecasters' dreams of becoming famous and website operators' hopes to profit off their fantasies. Some lifecasters — like Justine Ezarik, also known as iJustine — even thought they'd parlay online notoriety into a business of their own selling product placements in their so-called lives.

None of that panned out. Advertisers only value authenticity when it's carefully scripted; the actual surprise of live broadcasts — violence, profanity, and sheer weirdness — is not a value proposition for them. And while lifecasting services have signed up millions of users, most attract an audience that numbers in the tens. No surprise, then, that Yahoo Live, the fading Internet giant's try at the market, is shutting down today.

A farewell video made by a Yahoo Live user, with clips cobbled together from various feeds, shows the problem. It's nearly impossible to police live broadcasts, leaving sites vulnerable to outbreaks of sex and nudity — or worse. And some will pay any price for fame. One Justin.tv lifecaster overdosed on camera last month — and some of his viewers laughed cruelly as he died.

If site operators do manage to keep things clean, users feel nannied to death — and are left boring each other silly. The most common activity on Yahoo Live? Spinning around in one's desk chair, over and over. Here's the best illustration — only slightly NSFW — of why lifecasting will persist as a mind-numbing timewaster long after it proves not to be a path to glory:

Wednesday night, after he posted a suicide note on the Web, he overdosed on pills on camera as users of Justin.tv, a lifecasting site, watched. Some posted comments egging Biggs on. When he took the pills and stopped moving, they laughed, expecting his corpse to revive and announce it was all a joke. No one called the police until hours had passed. They kept watching as officers came to the scene and verified his death. Even then, commenters wrote "OMFG" and "LOL."

NewTeeVee, an online-video industry publication, called the incident a "a striking display of the power of live video." The power, but definitely not the glory: It shows how the viewers of lifecasting devalue life. Users of sites like Justin.tv have grown accustomed to watching people mug for the camera. All the world's a stage, and all the men and women on webcams are merely players. But what happens when we're not playing around?

Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel, in a statement, didn't comment on the video, merely noting the site's policy for removing content flagged as "objectionable." The digital record of Biggs's death is just bits on a server. What about the users who cheered Biggs on as he performed a snuff film? Can we flag them, too? There will always be teenagers who try to kill themselves in awful ways. But one would hope the audience would not applaud.

As a nearby source explains:

Justin got introduced to some guy sitting down and quickly started yelling and waving his arms. Justin accused the guy of stealing his broadcasters, using words like "incessant" and "out of control". Justin then said something about "staying off his fucking site" or that he'll just "break the guy's face", with his fists clenched. The guy just sat there pretty calmly and simply asked Justin for more than 1 example of content poaching. After Justin stumbled to answer the guy continued to say "this is not worth my time." Stumped, Justin kind of gave up, apologized, and walked away embarrassed.

More photos of Kan, Julia Allison, Sarah Lacy, and other afterpartiers:

At August, things got crowded up real fast. There were more women in the crowd this year, a change from sausagefests past. But they were hardly breaking Valley gender barriers. The marketers at the Plista booth lamented that their competitors were getting attention by hiring cute girls to serve free beer. (I still don't remember what Plista does.) A fellow with an accent — possibly a put-on — asked Yahoo Tech Ticker cohost Sarah Lacy if she worked in PR, because "you're so pretty." Here's Lacy's account of the conversation:

Dude: "You girls are really lovely you must work in PR."
Lacy: "Did you really just say that? That's incredibly insulting. Never say that to a woman in any business setting."
Dude: "No, I just mean because every pretty girl I've met here is in PR."
Lacy: "Yes, I know what you meant. that's why it's insulting. It's like assuming a woman in an office is a secretary."
Dude: "Blah blah."
Lacy: "You know what? There's a lot of people i actually want to talk to here." (walks off)

He came up to me TWICE after that, interrupting conversations to apologize.

Lacy: "Look, I don't care dude. just don't ever say it again because it's textbook insulting."

Everyone was mesmerized by Julia Allison, the former Star editor-at-large (read: TV spokesperson) turned Wired covergirl. That is, if you were important enough to warrant a conversation with her. Once the 30 seconds of polite time she gives you is up she'd turn free agent and could easily be stolen by somebody like Facebook's Dave Morin. Speaking of being mesmerized, rap impresarios MC Hammer and Chamillionaire showed up as well. They mingled amongst the geek kids talking about tech and rap while the Olds just guffawed at the entire thing from afar.

As the party wound up and the business-card-swapping got all the more frantic, Duck9's Larry Chiang put his afterparty plan into motion. His brilliant scheme: Send the entrepreneurs a URL with an invite to the Four Seasons Palo Alto and misdirect the venture capitalists with an otherwise identical invite to the Westin — a plausible location, since that was where Chamillionaire was staying. For non-VCs, the choice came down to Chiang's pool party at the Four Seasons, or Julia Allison's expedition to the Cheesecake Factory with Randi Zuckerberg, the nerd chanteuse and sister of Facebook CEO Mark. I crashed the pool party. I like to think I made the right decision for Valleywag readers.

At the Seasons, we saw Brian Solis working the crowds like a pro. Justin Kan of Justin.tv enjoying the jacuzzi in his underwear surrounded by girls. Shira Lazar mingled with Michael Arrington (perhaps prepping for an interview). And I even witnessed Jason Baptiste of Publictivity pitch a movie deal to Sarah Lacy based on her book. Michael Cera to play Zuckerberg anyone?

Which brings us to a tweak in Arrington's business model. Michael, instead of charging sponsors for booths at the party party, why not sell sponsorships at the afterparty? I don't remember any of the companies who paid for my attention on Sand Hill Road. But the scenes of Silicon Valley's finest stumbling around at poolside? Burned into my memory.

However, signing distribution deals with American big leagues is rather more complicated — and expensive. The leagues have preferred to own their own Web outlets. Major League Baseball has nearly a decade of experience doing just that. Justin.tv's enablement of real-time piracy will not win it many clubhouse friends. And ultimately, why would anyone pay to watch crappy Flash video when they can get HD over satellite and cable? (Photo by miss karen)

How would you do it without causing problems (ie people thinking you're up for sale)?

You can read others' "exclusive" posts with lots of fantastic-sounding statistics about how well Justin.tv is doing. Short version: the site has 57 years worth of video that no one will ever watch in its archives. Too bad those bloggers didn't bother to count the hours of improperly streamed videos. We suspect investors and potential advertisers, not to mention MLB and NBA attorneys, would be a lot more interested in that figure.

Michael Siebel, Justin.tv:

Justin.tv is the biggest live video startup with the most traffic, the most registered users, and the best community. But it wasn't easy to get to the top spot. There are many hard problems to building and scaling a live video site and Yahoo Live is going through those pains currently. I think YouTube will face similar challenges.

YouTube's reported plans to move into live video is important validation for the market and will bring more awareness to the ways live video is changing the way people access media online. Ustream.TV has been singularly focused on live video broadcasting for more than a year now, and has built a large base of regular, compelling broadcasters who use our simple, reliable and robust platform to stream compelling, event-based content to a broad range of audiences across the globe, many of which weren't before privy to such media. Our growth is further evidenced by the traction we have gained through partnerships with leading companies such as Veoh, Digg, Sun Microsystems, the Republican National Convention, Bebo and others; the 200,000 broadcasters and millions of viewers that are now using our site regularly, and the daily growth we continue to experience. We welcome YouTube to this growing market and are glad that even more consumers will have access to great live video content.

Yahoo! Advanced Products releases an internal alpha of the new video service Yahoo! Live.

Yahoo! Live is social TV, where you're the star! Create your own social broadcasting experience. Start by broadcasting yourself from your webcam, invite your friends to chat with you, they'll go live with you, and you're all on candid camera!

The service is scheduled for release in early February, but be the first to test it and tell us what you think!

Join our mailing list at http://ilist.yahoo.com/wws/info/ylive-discuss for general discussion and to announce upcoming broadcasts.

We know it's easy to get carried away once you're on camera, but a few things to keep in mind about Yahoo! Live -
- This is an internal alpha release (Yahoos only!) so it's confidential.
- The service is still in development and may undergo outages, so any data saved may be lost prior to public launch.
- The service may not be accessible if you are on a wireless connection, due to security concerns. You can work around this by setting your browser to go through a proxy server. Here's how: http://twiki.corp.yahoo.com/view/Mingle/SocksProxyHowTo. Otherwise, please use the service from a hard wired connection.

Anker, LiveJournal founder Fitzpatrick, Sup CEO Andrew Paulson and some of his Russian engineers, a passel of Six Aparters, and one slightly bewildered goat held a bash at 111 Minna to celebrate the split. Also there: Fitzpatrick's omnipresent ex, Pownce engineer Leah Culver. Culver was in good spirits, though, despite the rumor Fitzpatrick's seeing someone in Russia. She too has a new beau, Justin.tv's Kyle Vogt. We're just waiting for the inevitable Leahcast.

Culver wasn't the only camera-friendly type there. Natali Del Conte, CNET's newly hired TV personality, stole the spotlight with a sparkling appearance just as I was leaving 111 Minna.

Ezarik quickly rose to the top of the lifecasting niche, and now she's cashing in. That she's going with an unknown just shows how her own brand has outgrown all the services she uses. But will her old flames stay infatuated while she pumps up the competition? And is iJustine a strong enough commodity on her own to support a dedicated site? As her male counterpart Justin Kan can attest, achieving fame is no small task, but staying on top is a whole lot harder.

Justine claims:

I never said I was leaving jtv.. so I'm not really sure where they got that info!

Justin.tv's PG-rated guidelines restrict far more than just sex. Commenters can be banned for "sexually suggestive" comments and "acting like a complete idiot." Doesn't that sum up the site's audience? Broadcasts without the voluntary age restriction can be banned for "cursing." Any broadcast can be banned for "nudity." The typical lifecaster and his audience is going to cross all of these lines, and live broadcasts will be impossible to police. Our suggestion to Justin.tv: Drop the sex angle altogether and pay to send your users to war zones. Call it "strifecasting."

The law placed onerous requirements on producers of sexually explicit material to maintain extensive dossiers on the "actors" appearing in their content. When Justin.tv first removed a broadcast for containing sex (one half of the tandem happened to be Nick McGlynn, a staffer at Valleywag publisher Gawker Media), we argued the site was turning its back on its best chance for traffic, in a bid to attract mainstream investors. Emmett Shear, the CTO of the startup, defended the decision in the comments by claiming the startup did not have the resources to comply with the law. It was a weak argument then, and now it's entirely invalid.

At the time, Shear stated:

As for sex — there are, unfortunate as it may be, laws regarding putting sex on camera. And we don't have the resources or capability to comply with those laws. We actually can't afford to become a porn site.

Should Justin.tv become a porn site? Not that there's anything wrong with that. There are plenty of other sites, like PornoTube and YouPorn, willing to fill that niche in today's Web 2.0. When Shear said that Justin.tv couldn't afford to become a porn site, perhaps he really meant that it didn't want to tangle with the competition. With its legal shield removed, Justin.tv has been revealed as simply not up to the task.