David Berlind article critical of "the failure of activitystrea.ms"
Phil Wolff
Update (11/5/2010): In response to this column, SkypeJournal.com editor Phil Wolff pinged me on Twitter to ask if I had heard of the http://activitystrea.ms standard. In that tweet, he says that it's "embraced" by Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft, and Google. I responded that I had heard of it, but in a context that it was a market failure. I was referring to Activate co-founder Anil Dash's on-stage interview of Twitter Platform/API Product Manager Ryan Sarver and Facebook CTO Bret Taylor at Web 2 Expo in New York which took place last month (video embedded below).
At 3:53 into the interview, Dash confronts Sarver and Taylor with a question about the need for standards and the failure of http://activitystrea.ms. Sarver responds first, elaborating on why the idea is too ambitious and Taylor follows up by agreeing with everything Sarver said. In other words, "Facebook" also agrees that a standard for activity streams is too ambitious.
On Twitter, Dash joined the conversation, tweeting that "All those companies "embrace" [http://activitystrea.ms], but there are no apps that use/depend on [it]." Dash goes on to say (in response to my question about the difference between "embrace" and "use") that "Embrace costs nothing and, usually, means nothing." As more information comes to light, it may become fodder for another one of my columns here on InformationWeek. Here's the video:
David Berlind is the chief content officer of TechWeb and editor-in-chief of TechWeb.com. He can be reached at dber...@techweb.com and you also can find him on Twitter and other social networks (see the list below).
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Monica Wilkinson
Thanks for letting us know and for making the editor aware of this spec. I wouldn't feel too stressed about it -- few people are familiar with how APIs are being invoked for different integrations.
I know for a fact that several integrations between major social networks use activitystrea.ms because I was involved first hand writing the code or working with developers who were writing the code and all done for the practical purpose of sharing activities data with a common vocabulary.
Both FB and Twitter already had well used APIs for activities so its not really a surprise that they didn't want make a 1 to 1 vocabulary change which would not mesh with their existing APIs.
However ActivityStrea.ms is still very useful for the publishers who were not previously modeling their activity streams for machine aided interpretation/filtering maybe not even modeling social activities at all and/or who wanted a standard clear specification which could help mediate the exchange. Guess I don't need to preach here everyone knows the value of open standards :)
Kevin and I recently had fun chatting with a new group of people at IIW about it and the concepts are even more powerful today when you think about synchronization of (dynamic) Personal Data Stores. I don't think we will have any shortage of publishers and consumers but we certainly do have work ahead.
-Monica
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Dan Scott
>
> Saw this article where Information Week's David Berlind bemoans the lack of standards for activity streams. I tweeted him if he'd seen activitystrea.ms. He responded (below). I'm assuming no direct response is called for. Indirect responses?
>>
>> Update (11/5/2010): In response to this column, SkypeJournal.com editor Phil Wolff pinged me on Twitter to ask if I had heard of the http://activitystrea.ms standard. In that tweet, he says that it's "embraced" by Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft, and Google. I responded that I had heard of it, but in a context that it was a market failure. I was referring to Activate co-founder Anil Dash's on-stage interview of Twitter Platform/API Product Manager Ryan Sarver and Facebook CTO Bret Taylor at Web 2 Expo in New York which took place last month (video embedded below).
>>
>> At 3:53 into the interview, Dash confronts Sarver and Taylor with a question about the need for standards and the failure of http://activitystrea.ms. Sarver responds first, elaborating on why the idea is too ambitious and Taylor follows up by agreeing with everything Sarver said. In other words, "Facebook" also agrees that a standard for activity streams is too ambitious.
>>
>> On Twitter, Dash joined the conversation, tweeting that "All those companies "embrace" [http://activitystrea.ms], but there are no apps that use/depend on [it]." Dash goes on to say (in response to my question about the difference between "embrace" and "use") that "Embrace costs nothing and, usually, means nothing." As more information comes to light, it may become fodder for another one of my columns here on InformationWeek. Here's the video:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey8M9AMVhpA&feature=player_embedded
>>
Indirect response - the spec is still evolving, which has probably
been a bit of an inhibitor for someone looking to create the consuming
app that Anil Dash seems to be looking for. Publishing a final 1.0
revision will help adoption.
It's also a relatively young spec, at least in activity areas like
mine (library systems, which with some exceptions are only just now
waking up to the social web). It was just a few weeks ago that I gave
a presentation on Activity Streams at the relatively influential
Access conference[1], with my findings from implementing Activity
Streams in a branch of the Evergreen library system[2]. After the
presentation, I had some interesting discussions with people at the
Library of Congress and OCLC, and I hope that we as libraries will
start to weave activity streams into our systems - but these things
take time and resources. It's a much easier sell to work on enabling a
standards-based means of expressing activities than to tie into
proprietary APIs.
1. http://coffeecode.net/archives/237-Standard-Social-Sharing-and-Aggregation-on-the-Go-Access-2010-presentation.html
2. http://markmail.org/message/nb2w7fslmsi33x33
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Dan Scott
Laurentian University
Kevin Marks
Simon Grant
When my interest was raised in activity streams a few months ago, it took a while for me to understand that it was primarily about point actions. Perhaps my confusion was because activity streams came across as trying to cover things that were probably best covered in a different way.
I'd say that the best bet for a widely adopted activity streams spec would be to focus exclusively on point-like actions that are NOT state-change events. When there is a change of state, there is a new ball game, and the information isn't represented particularly well in a model that is a stream of point actions.
Point-like, non-state change actions are a particularly nice subset of things which I would have thought activity streams was in a very good position to cover. Focusing on these would surely remove the stigma of being "too ambitious".
The important question would then be to clarify the criterion for distinguishing point-like actions from state-change events.
For instance, the long discussion about "like" and "dislike" or "un-like" or however you term it suggests strongly to me that we are talking about something that people consider as a state change, and therefore pragmatically best left out of activity streams.
This is the kind of place where a little philosophical clarity can be very helpful and go a long way. It's not very hard, not particularly "intellectual", but rather clarifying common sense. Sending a message is an action. The action is primary; any state change is consequent and secondary. Something like changing one's e-mail address is primarily a state change; several messages may need to be sent about it. Something that happens over time, like a conference, is primarily to do with shared states and perhaps shared activities, but for activity streams I would have thought that it is the individual personal message-like actions that would fit, like registering, posting a comment to a discussion, etc. etc.
Let's hope that such clarity can result in the success of a slimmed-down activity streams spec.
Simon
Saw this article where Information Week's David Berlind bemoans the lack of standards for activity streams. I tweeted him if he'd seen activitystrea.ms. He responded (below). I'm assuming no direct response is called for. Indirect responses?
Update (11/5/2010): In response to this column, SkypeJournal.com editor Phil Wolff pinged me on Twitter to ask if I had heard of the http://activitystrea.ms standard. In that tweet, he says that it's "embraced" by Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft, and Google. I responded that I had heard of it, but in a context that it was a market failure. I was referring to Activate co-founder Anil Dash's on-stage interview of Twitter Platform/API Product Manager Ryan Sarver and Facebook CTO Bret Taylor at Web 2 Expo in New York which took place last month (video embedded below).
At 3:53 into the interview, Dash confronts Sarver and Taylor with a question about the need for standards and the failure of http://activitystrea.ms. Sarver responds first, elaborating on why the idea is too ambitious and Taylor follows up by agreeing with everything Sarver said. In other words, "Facebook" also agrees that a standard for activity streams is too ambitious.
On Twitter, Dash joined the conversation, tweeting that "All those companies "embrace" [http://activitystrea.ms], but there are no apps that use/depend on [it]." Dash goes on to say (in response to my question about the difference between "embrace" and "use") that "Embrace costs nothing and, usually, means nothing." As more information comes to light, it may become fodder for another one of my columns here on InformationWeek. Here's the video:
David Berlind is the chief content officer of TechWeb and editor-in-chief of TechWeb.com. He can be reached at dber...@techweb.com and you also can find him on Twitter and other social networks (see the list below).
Simon Grant
+44 7710031657
http://www.simongrant.org/home.html
Michael Sullivan
I think their needs to be a focus on a social gestures streams.
Sull
Monica Wilkinson
http://blog.socialcast.com/activities-and-standards/