FactoryCity

Earlier today, Rob Dolin announced the launch of additional sources of activities for Windows Live users — including MySpace, Hulu, Skyrock, and SlideShare.

Writing on the Windows Live Services blog, he outlines the premise behind the Activity Streams effort (emphasis original):

With today’s latest partner integrations on Windows Live, we’ll have over fifty web activities that Windows Live customers can add into their Windows Live experience. (To learn more about all the Windows Live partners, check out our Windows Live Team blog). Nearly all of the web activities employ a polling model where a customer enters some basic information about their presence on a website and then Windows Live periodically polls an XML feed of the customer’s activity on that site. In the past, this feed has been in RSS 2.0 or Atom and then for each partner, we have a custom XSLT that maps the elements from the customer’s feed to the data attributes in Windows Live’s system.

Challenges with Web Activities

There are two big challenges with this basic polling model of RSS 2.0 or Atom:

1. We need to develop a custom mapping for each partner
2. Each partner needs to have only one activity type or they need a way to communicate what type of activity each RSS 2.0 <item> or Atom <entry> is.

The emerging Activity Streams open standard comes in to help solve both of these problems.

How Activity Streams Help

Activity Streams help to address both of the above issues. First, instead of having to do a custom mapping for practically every Web Activities partner, with an open standard like Activity Streams, we can build a single mapping that can be used by multiple partners.

Second, Activity Streams includes <activity:verb> and <activity:object-type> elements so we can identify that one is a status update and another is a blog entry. Thus, services that have multiple activity types (like MySpace) can have a single feed that includes photos, status, blogs, music, and more.

This maps directly to my motivation in starting this effort, back in June of 2008:

The basic premise is this: lifestreams, alternatively known as “activity streams”, are great for discovering and exploring social media, as well as keeping up to date with friends (witness the main feature of Facebook and the rise of FriendFeed). I suggest that, with a little effort on the publishing side, activity streams could become much more valuable by being easier for web services to consume, interpret and to provide better filtering and weighting of shared activities to make it easier for people to get access to relevant information from people that they care about, as it happens.

By marking up social activities and social objects, delivered in standard feeds [...], we enable anyone to run a FriendFeed-like service that innovates and offers value based on how well it understands what’s going on and what’s relevant, rather than on its compatibility with any and every service.

We’ve come a long way since then — and the acquisition of FriendFeed only helps to reinforce the timeliness of this work.

It’s also been incredibly gratifying to see people like Rob and Monica Keller devote so much energy (see MySpace’s activity streams docs) to helping this effort get off the ground. Maintaining the momentum of this project has been challenging at times — considering that Mart Atkins (author of the Activity Streams specs) has a full time job at Six Apart and David Recordon (my other cohort) just left there to go work at Facebook (where Jerry Cain has been key in getting Facebook to adopt activity streams).

Seeing large players adopt the activity streams format is good for the open web ecosystem. It’s good for individual choice and for enabling market-based mechanisms that encourage competition and good behavior. It enables the decentralization of reading and publishing, and provides individuals with a record of both what their friends are doing as well as what they themselves have done. And these things are all good for the development of the people-centric social web.