Slides for the San Francisco Ruby meetup 10/16/08

1. Activity Streams What are Activity Streams? Lets start with some examples in the wild. A Ruby-On-Rails Plug-in by Jonathan Dugan and Rama McIntosh Extracted from the Legaltorrents.com website.

2. Activity Streams at github.com One use of activity streams at github.com is a site-wide news feed.

3. Activity Streams at github.com When a user is logged in, the Activity Stream is filtered to the user's interests. Of course there is also a breadcrumb view to follow everything a user does.

4. Activity Streams at Facebook Facebook was an early adopter of Activity Streams The new layout makes activity streams more prominent

5. Friendfeed is all Activity Streams Friendfeed.com is an entire website dedicated to do nothing but sharing and discussing activity streams.

6. Activity Streams at WordPress WordPress.com uses activity streams for blog posts.

7. DISO Open Standards http://diso-project.org/ : Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes - pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction. DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts . or “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

8. DISO and Activity Streams DISO is working to come up with a set of standards for publishing and sharing activity streams using microformats This Activity Streams Rails plug-in implements the developing DISO open standard for structuring activites For more information see http://diso-project.org/wiki/activity-streams

9. http://diso-project.org/wiki/ activity-streams-examples

10. Why use Activity Streams Enable social media discovery (social objects) Enable automated content generation from user activity Enable a user to find new interests, users, objects Enable increased community involvement between users Inform users of critical events or those of specific interest User activity increases exposure of your site and your content on activity aggregators and distributors

11. Activity Streams: The Implementation The Activity Streams plug-in is currently implemented as a Rails plug-in with the ultimate goal of packaging it as a gem. The plug-in adds models, controllers, views, and an after filter for logging activity streams. Activity Streams adds three models. 1. ActivityStreams – The log of Activities 2. ActivityStreamTotals – An optional total cache for an activity 3. ActivityStreamPreferences – User Preference for which activities can be accessed

12. Activity Streams: The Model

13. Setting up filters for a Controller

14. View Examples When following a feed the activities show up in the Creator's View: When following a feed the activities show up in the User's View:

15. Default HTML Output (for social object)

16. Default HTML Output (for user) Delete Activity

17. User Preferences The built-in user preferences gives a user finite control over the their activities.

18. Atom feeds Activity Streams have an atom feed so users can consume and share their activities in other sites. This feed is structured with DISO markup for parsing actor, action, and social objects

19. Just the Beginning Activity Streams is recently released in beta. We are presenting it to get feedback. We expect to improve the plug-in further. TODO: More outputs. For example, feeds back to facebook connect, twitter, friendfeed, blogs, etc. Add XMPP extensions. You tell us.

20. Links Activity Stream Home Page: http://www.matsonsystems.com/activity-streams/ The rdoc: (best documentation): http://www.matsonsystems.com/activity-streams/rdoc/ Activity Streams at github.com: http://github.com/face/activity_streams/tree/master Activity Streams at RubyForge: http://rubyforge.org/projects/activitystreams/ Working Example Site: http://www.legaltorrents.com My Blog/Contact: http://myutil.com/