Facebook has a good example of an activity stream. When you login to your account you can see a feed of things that your “friends” are doing. It may be a “News Feed” to Facebook but these are the activity streams of your “friends” aggregated here. They are changing their profile pics, joining the group “Toronto Crime Stoppers”, becoming “friends”, and hosting a jam at the Unicorn tonight. They are doing all these things and adding the Zombies Appplication (I frickin’ hate these apps). We will see finer granularity for what we see in our aggregator and what we publish to our activity streams.
“I already belong to a social network….it’s called the internet” - Cory Doctorow?
People will still be using multiple tools that specialize in some area of expertise to manage their social networks, but it will be published to a common feed for consumption.
There will be companies that will allow you to publish to your activity stream.
There will be many companies that will compete to host your activity stream.
We will see user-centric activity stream feeds just as we now are seeing the rise of user-centric IDs (openID, i-names)
“Data is the Intel side.” - Tim O’Reilly
Data portability is an important trend to watch but there are a few incremental steps we will see before people are touting their data around everywhere. That goes double for the data we store within the current social networking sites.
The tool providers will gain loyalty by having great UIs and adding value to the data we host with them, not the current reason for loyalty which is lock-in.
An activity stream aggregator will make publishing our activities that occur across the net to a single activity stream easy and transparent.
Think about what Facebook tried to do with beacon except not as evil and actually more secure with less privacy issues.
This would not only apply to commerce sites. It’s a marketing tool for the people using the social network and the stuff they interact with.
I could mark my flickr uploads to be published in my stream, videos on youTube, comments i make in groups and on blogs, and postings to twitter.
RSS has been around for years but main stream use is not very high because it still is not simple enough. Back in 2005, I had hoped that Windows Vista would usher in a new era for RSS and bring it to the limelight, but it hasn’t and people still toil along with live bookmarks.
Only internet geeks hand out their RSS feed URLs to friends!
People use RSS feeds for their portal pages (iGoogle) and don’t even realize it. They don’t need to know what’s going on under the hood and that’s when these sorta things get adopted by the mainstream.
Email, IM, Voice, and SMS are the communication tools of preference. The internet players that make these tools play nice together within our user-centric social network will be the ones that receive our attention.
The telcos aren’t gonna do it even though they may be best positioned to do so. The PC is a dying form factor which is being replaced by mobile devices. These devices have access to our photos, documents, calendar, email, voice mail, contact lists, text messages, and location data via cell tower or GPS. In the near future the cell phone will be our wallet and therefore will know our spending patterns better than Air Miles. The players that offer us the most value for controlled sharing of this information with them will receive our attention and loyalty.
Still think Google isn’t making a real bid in the upcoming 700Mhz spectrum auction?
Future of the Activity Stream Part 2
