Re: [diso-project] Facebook Open Streams API

[Chris Messina]

This is indeed good news for Facebook and for this community effort. 

I imagine that there will be a bunch of folks joining this list today, so there will probably be a bunch of new folks asking questions, getting acclimated and introduced to this idea (should be interesting, to say the least!).

At the very least, I'm excited to see how similar we can get the feeds coming out of MySpace and Facebook and I'm also eager to start looking at how we can replace the current activities API in OpenSocial with the Activity Streams format. I'm also eager to hear from Mike Malone about his progress on the feed validator tests he was writing... and then also looking at any new activity types that Facebook is publishing.

One of the greatest contributions we can make long term is to device a means for publishing, annotating, discussing and converging conversations around various activity verbs and object types. That work has yet to begin, but I think over the next several months, apart from further developing the spec, this is something that I'd like to see happen.

Chris

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Darren Bounds <dar...@cliqset.com> wrote:

ust saw Dave Morin post regarding the available of the FB Open Streams API: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=225

From the post:

"The home page design centralizes the stream of information that tells you what's going on right now in the world around you. With the Facebook Open Stream API users will be able to use applications to read and interact with their stream. As a Facebook developer you'll also be able to access the posts you've published into the stream and display them in your application, whether it's on a mobile device, Web site or desktop.

To enable developers to access the stream, we've built the Facebook Open Stream API to include the emerging Activity Streams standard."

Exciting stuff from Facebook for sure!

--
darren bounds
dar...@cliqset.com

--
Chris Messina
Open Web Advocate

factoryjoe.com // diso-project.org // openid.net // vidoop.com
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[Monica Keller]

Ok cool so we have:

http://wiki.developer.myspace.com/index.php?title=Standards_for_Activity_Streams
and

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Using_Activity_Streams

Pretty similar. The main differences actually regarding the
flexibility of the queries
Would love to see a consumer of both coughPlaxoOrSeesmiccough and of
course the validator !

At MySpace we have just spent time this sprint updating our api to
comply to the current spec verbatim(as verbatim as our qaing detected
at least) and it will be going out tomorrow night :)
I hope the FB folks get a chance to do this as well so less consumers
are impacted.

Also I think its super important that we communicate all changes to
the specs going forward to the current implementors at least.
I dont know if people want to subscribe to github editor's updates on
friendfeed or have it sent here.

Fun stuff can't wait to see more implementations !

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[Chris Messina]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 12:50 AM, Monica Keller <monica...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok cool so we have:

http://wiki.developer.myspace.com/index.php?title=Standards_for_Activity_Streams
and

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Using_Activity_Streams

Pretty similar. The main differences actually regarding the
flexibility of the queries
Would love to see a consumer of both coughPlaxoOrSeesmiccough and of
course the validator  !

Ha, +1!

I'm wondering if there isn't also an opportunity — beyond the Atom Extension — to develop a Portable Contacts-like query-language for activities? Seems like that might accelerate interoperable activity consumption in web and desktop applications?

We could essentially pull patterns from PoCo and simply apply them to activities... therefore arriving at JSON representations of activity streams?

 

At MySpace we have just spent time this sprint updating our api to
comply to the current spec verbatim(as verbatim as our qaing detected
at least) and it will be going out tomorrow night :)
I hope the FB folks get a chance to do this as well so less consumers
are impacted.

You rock Monica! It's great to have so much transparency and enthusiasm from MySpace here.

I do think that, as we build momentum, having a sane build and release cycle for all producers would be ideal — small steps incremental will lead to great progress I think.

 

Also I think its super important that we communicate all changes to
the specs going forward to the current implementors at least.
I dont know if people want to subscribe to github editor's updates on
friendfeed or have it sent here.

Hopefully a new site (which I need to develop a gameplan for!) will help to communicate these changes and our progress.

In the meantime, I just added the Git commit feed to the Friendfeed Room:

https://friendfeed.com/activitystreams

Chris

[Ari Steinberg]

btw, just wanted to pass along a quick mention that i wasn't directly
involved in the effort from facebook, other than some cheering from
the sidelines. but i'd be glad to pass along any feedback you guys
have on our implementation to the guys involved. i think a few of
them may be lurking on this list as well, but maybe they're shy ;).
-ari

[Chris Messina]

To that point, Ari, is there a way that we can relieve the lurkers of their shyness? We won't bite, really! — but we do need feedback and insights from their work on Facebook's implementation.

I know, for example, that the use of categories was somewhat creative:

<category term="Status Update" label="Status Update" />

We also haven't heard anything from consumers like Seesmic, who I presume (hope) are using the format for various purposes.

To that end — we need more examples of how people are *actually* using this content — if they're just slurping the ATOM content or making real use of activity streams stuff!

Furthermore, it would be great to add some media-specific examples to the feed.

Chris

[Chris Messina]

This is very useful Jerry, thanks!

I've documented the start of this information on this page on the wiki:

https://activitystreams.pbworks.com/Facebook-Activity-Streams

I'd like to see a similar page for other implementations, like MySpace. I think these pages need additional information, but wanted to at least get a stub in place so we can add more information over time.

Chris

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 11:07 PM, Jerry Cain <je...@facebook.com> wrote:

Hey there, Chris, Ari, others..

Our implementation uses the following activity verbs:

post

share

At the time I initially implemented this, there were only two verbs (post being one of them if I remember), and I thought the share concept was so central to the Facebook experience that it should have a presence in our Atom feed.  I know that Plaxo is programmatically working against the verb to distinguish between shared videos (i.e. something from youtube) and content created specifically for Facebook (i.e. video recorded through Facebook's video recording feature.)

As far as the activity object types, I used the following:

status

note

photo

video

album

song

profile

news-article

blog-entry

link

When implementing the activity object contributions to the Atom feed, it was important for us to maintain parity with what's available via FQL and our API, and the API response includes type information about what type of object is being posted/shared, etc.  We didn't want the AS option to be harder to program against, so we included some specialized object types that matched up with the same words we've used in our feed stories.  In practice, profile, news-article, and blog-entry come up a very small fraction of the time, and truth be told, profile, news-article, and blog-entry could be killed and replaced with link.  I can include a more type-specific title in the entry even if I go with a smaller set of object types.

Let me know if you have have any more questions/comments.

Jerry

[Monica Keller]

Sure I can add it when I get the permissions for the wiki.

But good to see
We have a lot of overlap: both use post and share as the main verbs

The only difference really is we have synched to the spec more
recently:
So the spec doesnt have "status". We just use "note" altho quite
logically "status" can be modeled as a specialization of note
"album" should be "photo-album", there is no "news-article" but there
is "article" however it could be a valid specialization.

Everything else is the same which rocks !

> > On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Ari Steinberg <arimsteinb...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> >> btw, just wanted to pass along a quick mention that i wasn't directly
> >> involved in the effort from facebook, other than some cheering from
> >> the sidelines.  but i'd be glad to pass along any feedback you guys
> >> have on our implementation to the guys involved.  i think a few of
> >> them may be lurking on this list as well, but maybe they're shy ;).
> >> -ari
>

> >> On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Chris Messina <chris.mess...@gmail.com>

> >> wrote:
>
> >> > On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 12:50 AM, Monica Keller <

> >> monica.kel...@gmail.com>

> >> > wrote:
>
> >> >> Ok cool so we have:
>

> >>http://wiki.developer.myspace.com/index.php?title=Standards_for_Activ...

[Chris Messina]

...and I think that's exactly the conversation that we need to be having — and working out on the wiki.

We may need to just do mappings for the time being, but for 1.0, I think that we should have, as I said, Facebook and MySpace (among others) "speaking the same language".

Documenting current approaches and holes in the spec is how we'll get there.

Chris