One of the more interesting sessions I’ve attended at SXSWi 2010, so far, has been Chris Messina’s presentation on activitystrea.ms, which is promoting a new standard for communicating activity streams: the “news” feeds you see on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.   Besides those two well-known sites, there are dozens of systems out there that also collect/display/share sequential activity data associated with their users.

As more and more people use social networking sites that maintain these activity streams, demand will grow for systems like cliqset.com to aggregate this data and add some value through analysis of a user’s overall activity across the spectrum of social sites. Wouldn’t you like a single site that displayed the collected activity of your friends, regardless of where that activity was actually logged?  I know I would.  It’d also be nice if the activity was displayed in a more intuitive and actionable manner.  If someone adds a photo to their Flickr account, or tweets a URL, I’d like to see a thumbnail, or a hyperlink that I can click to view that picture/web page.

By adopting a specific standard structure for representing these data streams, it becomes easier for systems maintaining activity streams to publish stream data in an easily consumed format.  The activitystrea.ms spec, which is an extension of the atom feed format,  incorporates semantic web elements and requires the data to be structured to convey meaning, with actors, verbs, and objects.  Every activity consists of an actor doing something (verb) to something (object).  For instance, “Chris Schnyder” (actor)  “shared” (verb) “a blog post” (object).  The “verb” portion of the data must correspond to a standard, defined action that is part of the spec.  Currently proposed verbs and object types are:

By using a well-defined and accepted list of verbs and object types, systems consuming activitystream formatted data feeds have all they need to properly understand each activity and render that activity to the user in a meaningful and intuitive manner.

More details on this evolving standard and its adoption by major activity tracking systems can be found at http://activitystrea.ms.