W3C Activity Streams

What is Activity Streams?[1][2]

An activity stream is a list of recent activities performed by an individual, typically on a single website. For example, Facebook's News Feed is an activity stream. Since the introduction of the News Feed on September 6, 2006, other major websites have introduced similar implementations for their own users. Since the proliferation of activity streams on websites, there have been calls to standardize the format so that websites could interact with a stream provided by another website. The Activity Streams project, for example, is an effort to develop an activity stream protocol to syndicate activities across social web applications. Several major websites with activity stream implementations have already opened up their activity streams to developers to use, including Facebook and MySpace. Activity streams come in two different variations:

Generic feeds: all users see the same content in the activity stream.
Personalised feeds: each user gets bespoke items as well as custom ranking of each element in the feed.

The standard provides a general way to represent activities. For instance "Jack added Hawaii to his list places to visit". Would be represented as actor:jack, verb:add, object:Hawaii, target:placestovisit.

Implementors of the activity Activity Streams draft include Gnip, Stream, Stream-Framework and Pump.io.

Types of Activity Streams according to W3C[3]

Little "a" activity streams: are a UI paradigm for displaying recent activity within a context. Activities are typically displayed in reverse chronological order and consist of relatively simple statements such as "John uploaded a new photo" or "12 people liked Sally's post".

Big "A" Activity Streams: is a data format for encoding and transferring activity/event metadata. The first version of the specification was published in 2011 by the independent Activity Streams Working Group and is based on extending Atom. The current (2.0+) version of the spec is JSON-based.

Why Standardized Activity Streams?

When activity streams became standardized, websites became able to get stream information easier from one another. AActivity stream makes it easier to categorize and track the user's activities in a single website, and therefore getting more information about the user experience which results in developing better products for users.

Though activity stream arises from social networking, nowadays it has become an essential part of business software. Enterprise social software is used in different types of companies to organize their internal communication and acts as an addition to traditional corporate intranet. Collaboration software like Jive Software, Yammer and Chatter offer activity stream as a separate product. At the same time other software providers such as tibbr, Central Desktop and Wrike offer activity stream as an integrated part of their collaboration software solution.

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_Streams_(format)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_stream
3. https://www.w3.org/wiki/Activity_Streams