Some research on action verbs

[Martin Atkins]

Hi folks,

Sorry to jump into this late. It was at IIW today that I first heard
of this group's existence.

I've been thinking about the problem of general activity streams --
along with the problem of consuming social data and relationships
generically -- for some time now. I wrote up this proposal a while
back:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dg3mt5r8_31hg5964hd
...and I later proposed a simple extension to Atom to allow the same
relationships to be expressed as a consumable stream. (basically just
adding "rel" to the Atom entry element with the same values.)

One thing I noticed in today's discussion is that while I've been
thinking of action streams in terms of
a stream of relationship changes, the "<subject> does <verb> to
<object> on <service>" model makes a lot more sense. While I now
realise that the specific microformat and Atom extension I proposed
don't go far enough to solve the problem here, I thought I'd throw out
a link to that proposal just because it starts with a general analysis
of some popular social objects and the relationships that social
networking sites publish about those social objects today. I'm sure
I'm preaching to the choir here, but I hope it can prove useful for
something. In many cases, it seems that the "verb" in our action
streams is the creation of one of these relationships.

The other thing that bothers me about my proposal as it currently
stands is that it in many places conflates the "type" of the target
with the relationship. rel="attended-event" is basically a hack so
that I could punt on a way to determine that the target an event. I've
tried to talk myself around by saying "one person's photograph is
another person's product" (on DeviantArt, for example), but I remain
unsure. I do however feel that it needs be possible for "object" to be
of multiple types simultaneously, though.

[Jesse Clark]

You might already be aware of this but here is an example of how Six
Apart addressed the problem of describing relationship changes in an
Atom feed:
http://updates.elsewhere.im/

-Jesse