Someday soon you may see a cryptic new icon on some
of your favorite sites. It represents a new standard–a
microformat to be exact–that describes one thing: what you’re doing to
whom on the social web. Subject, verb, object.
The standard, known as Activity Streams, aims to solve the problem that FriendFeed–acquired by Facebook a year ago, but largely
stagnant since then–was supposed to fix: bringing together what your friends are doing from all over the web. They may be posting pictures to Flickr and Picassa,
microblogging at Twitter, liking things of Facebook, recommending articles at
their favorite news sites, etc. It’s a firehose of information that you should
be able to filter intelligently–and, more importantly, add to as easily
as you add a new RSS feed to your reader or a new mailing list to your email
inbox.
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But that will require an open standard on which all
parties agree. Hence, Activity Streams, which are already being tested (even though the standard has yet to be finalized at a 1.0 level) by Facebook,
MySpace, Windows Live, Google Buzz, BBC, Opera, TypePad, Cliqset, Gowalla, Hulu, TypePad and others.
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Much of the activity described by Activity Streams can
already be encompassed in a standard RSS feed, but not all of it. One thing RSS
is bad at, according to the microformats
wiki entry on Activity Streams, is verbs–there’s no specific field
into which a service provider can dump an action.
In Activity Streams, verbs are their own objects,
and the variety of actions that can be represented is limited only by the
standard itself. Providers can also use verbs outside
the standard, taking the chance that they’ll eventually be incorporated, or
that a downstream client could parse them anyway. Here’s a list of the verbs incorporated in the Activity Streams standard so far:
To date, the most impressive implementation of Activity
Streams comes from the the social network / social network aggregator
Cliqset, which is sort of a more-evolved version of FriendFeed. That site’s implementation allows users to
“pull in content from almost 70 social networks and services”–including photos, status updates, videos, blog posts etc.
The benefits of Activity Streams, according to
project lead Chris Messina, will include “Staying in touch across the web;
an open, emergent ecosystem; filtering, search, automation and stats” and
the ability to “coalesce and merge” content from friends.
In
other words, you’ll never have to re-read your buddy’s syndicated Tweets in both
your Twitter client and on Facebook again. More importantly, it’s possible
that, with the aid of intelligent filtering, you’ll be able to get as much–or as little–information about your friends and family as you like.
