If there's a hot new social media trend happening, you can bet that companies are trying to find a way to use it to. It happened of course with blogging, it happened with Twitter, and it is now happening with FriendFeed and other lifestreaming apps.

Indeed RSS vendor Pheedo has coined a neat term for this: brandstreaming. They define a brandstream as "a consistent flow of content created by a brand".

To back up its case for brands using lifestreaming tools, Pheedo points to a recent Universal McCann report stating that content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months. Overall, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher's site - through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices.

That's an incredible stat and it puts into stark focus the importance, for companies, of engaging with users outside of their own website. As our own Alex Iskold wrote last week, companies should do this not just using APIs, but making use of all the major consumer web platforms.