Activity Streams
Chris Messina
Learning about the Open Stack for the Social Web
December 19, 2008 ☃ Digg, 135 Mississippi St, San Francisco, CA

“Lifestreaming”

Today
• Last.fm
• Jaiku
• Facebook newsfeed
• FriendFeed
• etc.

The challenge
• Develop a format for expressing activities
• Compelling experiences from activity feeds
• The zero-knowledge test
• etc.

FriendFeed Services

The Benefits
• Staying in touch across the web
• An open, emergent ecosystem
• Filtering, search, automation & stats
• Optimal, compelling experiences with activities
• Coalescing, merging, de-duping
• etc.

Examples

last.fm

sweetcron(yongfook.com)

Facebook

FriendFeed

boxee.tv

Movable Type Motion

Eventbox

Anatomy of an activity

Actor verb object [context]

factoryjoe tweeted Niches Bitches! [via SMS]

Actor verb object {indirect object} [context]

Chris bought Planet Earth {for Brynn} [at Amazon.com]

Activities on the Open Web

I visit davidrecordon.com

I decide I want to follow his activities
Sign in to follow Dave!

I sign in with my OpenID

At my hub, I’m asked whether I want to follow Dave

I say yes, and am asked which
activity types I’m interested in...

Dave Recordon
Worst username evar.
San Francisco, CA
davidrecordon.com
Contact details
Status updates
Photos
Bookmarks
Blogs
daveman692
Six Apart
Location
Music
Movies
Slide presentations
Events
Travel
Local reviews
Books
Add subscriptions
Your message (optional)
Hi there! We met that conference
last week. I’ve subscribed to your
updates on my site.
-Chris
Access requires permission from Dave
Add contact
Inspired by Jyri Engeström

Should any of the selected types be protected, I will
be asked whether I want to request access

If yes, an OAuth request will be sent which Dave
will later be able to approve, deny or ignore

...And Dave’s public activities will
show up in my activities dashboard

...And if Dave approves my request, his
protected activities will show up later

More soon at activitystrea.ms

Fin.
me -› factoryjoe.com