negative actions (e.g delete) why not?

[Peter H. Reiser]

Hi - 

I would like to start a discussion about negative actions.

To support our use cases (e.g. dynamic search index update, social value/reputation calculation) we need to get all social activities  of a person including negative actions like delete.

(see http://wikis.sun.com/display/ceqdoc/Activity+Streams for a full list of verbs)

I have posted the  use cases on the activity stream wiki .

Monica Keller raised a very interested and valid point 

"Because you don't see activities of the form "Monica is no longer friends with Dan". In fact syndicating pubicly deletes can draw more attention to these than intended. Look at the picture she deleted ! We dont want systems capitalizing misfortunes. This spec covers public syndication so that is why we chose not to focus on negative actions. Users woud hate it.
Having said that there are multiple use cases this spec does not cover but since its based on atom we can use atom extensions like feedsync to address."

While I fully agree that negative activities exposed to the public can be bad I  am not sure that this is the right reason not to support negative values in the activtiystreams standard. 

I need to look in more details into feedsync but my concern is that we might  need to support multiple standards to get all social activities of a person.

Thanks for your feedback

Peter

[Martin Atkins]

Peter H. Reiser wrote:
>
> I need to look in more details into feedsync but my concern is that we
> might need to support multiple standards to get all social activities
> of a person.
>

FeedSync is a generic mechanism for communicating the fact that some
item was deleted from a feed or modified.

I think this is the correct layer to solve the problem, since then it's
agnostic of the verb and object type and it communicates the fact that
the publisher actually wants to delete something rather than simply
publishing a new activity saying that it was deleted.

[Rob Dolin]

MySpace's Activity Streams implementation supports FeedSync: http://wiki.developer.myspace.com/index.php?title=ActivityStream_Queries#FeedSync

It's also useful in that it is a more general rescind of an activity without needing to define the negative verbs to pair with positive verbs (ex: delete pairs with post; but does it make sense with make-friend or tag?)

FWIW--
--Rob

[Martin Atkins]

Rob Dolin wrote:
> MySpace's Activity Streams implementation supports FeedSync: http://wiki.developer.myspace.com/index.php?title=ActivityStream_Queries#FeedSync
>
> It's also useful in that it is a more general rescind of an activity without needing to define the negative verbs to pair with positive verbs (ex: delete pairs with post; but does it make sense with make-friend or tag?)
>

To be clear, I'm not saying that these two things are different. A
feedsync delete of a positive activity does not mean the same thing as a
negative version of that activity. The feedsync delete just means it's
not in the stream anymore.

(Though with that said, if feedsync is applied to a feed of *objects*
rather than activities then a feedsync delete might be thought of as the
opposite of the implied "post" activity. But that's kinda janky.)

[Peter Reiser]

Rob - thanks for the explanation -
Feedsync definitely allows to "communicate" negative activities and
has some other advantages ...

My concern is that I would expect to have all possible activities of a
user in the standard activity stream covered. Limiting the standard
based on a (very valid) specific use case seems not to be the right
approach to me.

BTW - isn't the verb leave not part of the latest draft ? .. seems to
be a negative activity as well ...

Maybe we could have some mandatory verbs and optional verbs (like
delete,leave) in the specs.


FYI I just posted a blog post on activity streams and the proposed
mapping to the Community Equity service : http://socialadoption.com/?p=125
Fortunately the standard allows to introduce own verbs .. which we
will do :-)

Re: the MySpace Feedsync implementation - great work and great
documentation.... - its likely that we will include Feedsync in our
activity reader API as well ... :-)


Peter

On Sep 9, 2:37 am, Martin Atkins <m...@degeneration.co.uk> wrote:
> Rob Dolin wrote:

> > MySpace's Activity Streams implementation supports FeedSync:http://wiki.developer.myspace.com/index.php?title=ActivityStream_Quer...

[Phil Wolff]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Peter Reiser <peter....@gmail.com> wrote:

My concern is that I would expect to have all possible activities of a user in the standard activity stream covered. Limiting the standard based  on a (very valid) specific  use case seems not to be the right approach to me.

+1 Just because you *can* share an activity doesn't mean you *must* share it. That's a choice users and publishing tools can make; the protocol need only enable their choice to publish. Are you publishing privately, for the purpose of syncing or backing up everything, or sharing publicly, in which case you may be selective about which activities you disclose.