Overview of Activity Streams

1. Activity Streams
a format for syndicating social activities around the web
buzz.google.com/nhayashida
@nhayashida

2. Background

3. RSS/Atom
• RSS and Atom are the formats for syndicating web content (e.g. news headlines,
blogs, ...)
• A way to identify a feed entry is simple
• RSS and Atom are simple and easy work with, but don’t capture the richness of the
original activity
• All activities look the save in the RSS and Atom formats
RSS/Atom
Original

4. FriendFeed Problem
• FriendFeed is a real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social
media, social networking websites, and etc...
• FriendFeed let you add something like 58 services to your profile, basically using RSS
and Atom
• The size and diversity of social sites are now proliferating
• It becomes increasingly costly to support each new service that enters the market. The
FriendFeed developers would need to actually manually add support for new services
A universal format for Social Activities are required.
Activity Streams
* FriendFeed - http://friendfeed.com
* Aug 10, 2009 - FriendFeed have acquired by Facebook

5. Activity Streams

6. Activity in Activity Streams
• Activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some
instant in time by someone or something (the actor) against some kind of
person, place, or thing (the object). There may also be a target (like a photo
album or wishlist) involved
Activity = actor verb object (target) [context]

7. actor verb object (target) [context]
jeresig started following ji0er
nhayashida posted a photo [at Kawasaki]
GitHub
tomo liked this photo
Google Buzz
caritaa posted a comment (to this photo)
picplz Flickr

8. Activity in Atom format
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:activity="http://activitystrea.ms/spec/1.0/">
…
<entry>
<title>I favorited a YouTube video - Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology</title>
<link rel=”alternate” type="text/html" href="http://www.google.com/buzz/100498390572745122230/cXtwoFR4h3Q"/>
<id>tag:google.com,2010:buzz:z13lstiwoovuyjhyo04cjhwaszidvh4imgk</id>
<updated>2011-01-07T04:25:37.000Z</updated>
<author>
<activity:object-type>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/person</activity:object-type>
<name>Norimasa Hayashida</name>
<link rel="photo" type="image/jpeg" href="http://www.google.com/s2/photos/public/AIbEiAIAAA…”/>
</author>
<activity:verb>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/post</activity:verb>
<activity:object>
<activity:object-type>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/video</activity:object-type>
<title>Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrtANPtnhyg&amp;feature=autoshare"/>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" href="http://www.youtube.com/v/YrtANPtnhyg?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US"/>
</activity:object>
</entry>
…
</feed>

9. • Verbs:
• Mark as Favorite, Start Following, Mark as Liked, Make Friend, Join, Play, Post, Save,
Share, Tag, Update
• Objects
• Article, Audio, Bookmark, Comment, File, Folder, Group, List, Note, Person, Photo,
Photo Album, Place, Playlist, Product, Review, Service, Status,Video
• Context
• Location, Mood
http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/activity-schema-01.html

10. Stream in Activity Streams
• Stream is a feed of related activities for a given person or
social object
Related activities for David Pollak Related activities for Lotus Knows
GitHub Facebook

11. You are the platform
(A day with Activity Streams)
h0p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdULQHKNjeU

12. Activity Streams
• is a format for syndicating social activities around the web
Yahoo! Pulse
Publishers
...
Consumers
Blog Entries
News Feed
Activities
Updates
...
Windows Live

13. Example: Google Buzz API
http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/

14. References
• Activity Streams http://activitystrea.ms/
• Google Buzz API http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/
• MySpace Developer Platform: Standards for Activity Streams http://
developerwiki.myspace.com/index.php?title=Category:ActivityStreams
• Windows Live SDK: Activity Stream Templates http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ff748008.aspx
• Dev.Opera: Activity Stream Generator http://dev.opera.com/libraries/
activitystream/
• Merge/Incorporate Activity Streams into OpenSocial http://wiki.opensocial.org/
index.php?title=Merge/incorporate_Activity_Streams_into_OpenSocial