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.

YouTube execs estimated that if just 10 percent of the service's users took advantage of live streaming, the company would have to add 20 to 25 percent to its huge server and bandwidth infrastructure to support it.

Sounds like another sign that YouTube's popularity, while giving it a great position in the market, has become something of an Achilles' heel — every video played, every user added cost the company money, and neither creators or consumers are paying. Advertisers are only interested in a small percentage of videos on the site, and YouTube can't even sell all of that inventory. So adding new features such as live streams or improving quality would only serve to dig Google's $1.65 billion money pit even deeper. The episode is enlightening in one regard, though. It demonstrates how much influence YouTube's founders have at the company — little to none.

(Photo by Ben Cooper

"The wish for fame" is central to the disorder, says Dr. Ian Gold, who, along with his brother Joel, are turning their study of five Truman Show sufferers into the first paper on the subject. Fame-seeking, they say, "is a form of grandiosity, and the fear of threats such as surveillance can bring about paranoia," but in 2008? The idea that everywhere you go, a camera isn't far behind doesn't just make you a little bit crazy: Between San Francisco's Flickrazzi and CCTV, you might also be right. And that explains, in part, the rise of lifecasters like iJustine. If you're going to end up on camera anyway, why not make sure it's your own? Silicon Valley has always been in the business of monetizing fantasy. (Photo of lifecaster iJustine by Miss Karen)

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.

The disastrous beta launch of Yahoo Live puts the spotlight on firms like Ustream.tv and Justin.tv. There are more than a few companies that could easily integrate a streaming video service into their content strategy, including Microsoft, Apple, YouTube, or any number of camera and PC manufacturers.

Ustream focuses more on broadcasts of events, rather than lifecasts — those intensely boring 24/7 video streams of people's lives. Ustream has streamed several major concerts, including some from Hannah Montana, and has been used by a number of presidential candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, to broadcast exclusive events. The Republican National Convention will be on Ustream this summer. This focus on "eventcasting" could make it more respectable than a lifecasting startup — and more tempting to a major buyer like Microsoft.

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.

This time Ezarik isn't lip-synching to Randi Jayne "Yes, Mark of Facebook's sister" Zuckerberg's vocals. "I wrote, sang, shot and edited this one," she tells us. Ezarik is trying to showcase the range of skills needed to break away from the low-tech, unscripted, and unpromising format of lifecasting.

She bemoans how lifecasting is changing, as if people wanting the lifecaster to do foolish things, "begging for money and girls taking off their clothes for the cam" is a new development. Jennifer Ringley should have disproved that a decade ago.

Unfortunately for Ezarik, who got her start in lifecasting, that's always been and also will be the nature of the business. Perhaps it's really her career that she wishes would get crushed under the wheels of a truck; her viewers' eyes, poked out with a fork. In every jest, there's a grain of truth. And in every lifecast, something revealing.

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.

First there was angel investor Chris Yeh, who stepped in to guard his investment as CEO. Later, he gave way to Esurance founder and investor Chuck Wallace. "I give Ustream three months before it implodes," a tipster tells us. "The two founders have no Web experience, are money-hungry and think they are geniuses for taking [somebody elses]'s idea." Merriam-Webster couldn't have put it better.

Justine claims:

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