An activity stream is a mash-up of an individual’s or organization’s feeds. For example, my FriendFeed pages show activity from this blog, the Internet Time Blog, my Flickr account, bookmarks I put on Delicious, and my entries from Twitter. Tumblr operates similarly although it does a better job displaying photos and is a bit more spartan.
As people use various different web sites to blog, update their status, post their location, or photos, sites and tools have emerged to aggregate these various actions into a continuous eclectic stream of activities. Such activities typically involve a subject (the person doing the activity), a verb (what the “doing” is of the activity), and often a direct object (what the activity is being done to or with). Activity stream aggregators typically republish activities in reverse chronological order, independent of type of activity.
Activity streams are going to be wildly important for social learning. Few people have time to traipse around looking into all the nooks and crannies where a netizen or company is streaming content. The thought leaders in the activity streams space are thinking about standards for interoperability, how people can grant access to their feeds selectively, stream searching, de-duping, and security concerns. Last week, Google, Facebook, Nokia, Yahoo!, MySpace, Comcast, and other players huddled around a conference table in the offices of Six Apart in San Francisco to discuss activity streams. Marshall Kirkpatrick, reflecting on the event:
“Activity streams are already a big deal, but if these conversations can be fruitful, the results will be as big as the point in history when customers of different email providers became able to email each other or different telephone company customers became able to call each others’ phones.”
At a prior session, Chris Messina set forth the fundamental issues for rationalizing activity streaming.
If you want to take advantage of lightweight social learning in your organization, activity streams are a vital area to keep your eye on.
Related:
ReadWriteWeb: Google, Facebook, MySpace and More Meet to Talk Activity Streams
Chris Messina: activitystrea.ms
Marc Canter: Diso Activity Streams Standard
Wikipedia: nothing up yet
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