Activity streams: Liberate your data

Chris Messina works with the DiSo Project, Data Liberation Front, Activity Streams and a number of other organizations to develop and promote open standards. His presentation at SXSWi focused on using open Web standards to improve the way interactive companies display data.

What are activity streams?

In the movie Fight Club, there is a scene in which Ed Norton’s character is pacing around his room and talking about the things he has purchased. As he calls out items, a shopping catalogue-esque description pops onto the screen. This is an activity streams; a list of the things you have done, the places you have been to, the people you have met, etc.

Your Facebook news feed is an activity stream. But in Messina’s view, it is limited because it can’t integrate with other technologies to create systems and structures that do more than just document your activities.

Web portals

Messina attributes our lack of progress in data streams to our fixation on web portals, which is the way that one web company ports content to another site. This is usually done with some flavor of RSS. Many companies are using the Atom RSS specification, which streams the following attributes:

• title
• link
• description
• author
• ID
• updated type

There are two problems with this model. First, activity streams that follow the Atom RSS spec pretty much all look the same. There is also the problem of sorting through the activity streams in a unified way. Tools have come along to help us deal with the shotgun-like streams of data. FriendFeed, for example, aggregates about 20 popular content feeds. But so many content streaming businesses fail, move around, become acquired, etc., that supporting all these services isn’t sustainable.

Activity theory and social objects

Messina cites 19th century communist for coming up with a theory of activity. In trying to understand how to make workers more productive, activity theorists determined that providing tools for workers resulted in better productivity. And by framing activity theory within the idea of community, new concepts, such as artifacts, rules and roles emerge. Participants perform certain functions according to certain rules to create social objects, which gives them a way to make sense and meaning out of their results.

A social object is an artifact created or found by someone in a community. They are pivot points for social interactions. An interesting video you found, a picture that you took or simply an update to your status can all be social objects. As users, we are rolling around the Web collecting social objects and sharing them with friends. When someone comments or adds a like, it adds sense and meaning to the object.

So what?

The idea is that with better activity streams, we can share social objects in a way that gives us more information about ourselves and out communities. Some businesses are already doing more with activity streams. Fitbit and Nike+ and iPod sport kit for example, are fitness devices that tracks your activity and streams it to your computer.

Websites, such as the internet radio service Last.fm, are also working to improve activity streams. The radio community define music genres, which you like or dislike, and the website optimizes your playlist. It almost literally makes a soundtrack for you life online.

There are also more serious applications of activity streams. Messina postulated activity stream-based medical records and financial reports, for example.

Universal format

Achieving greater things, according to Messina, hinges on developing a universal format for streaming data. Near the end of the presentation, he suggested making a few small changes to the metadata IDs in the Atom RSS format:

• Change the author attribute to actor
• Add a way to specify a verb
• Add an object
• Add a target

The metadata formula in Atom becomes title + link + description + actor + id + updated + verb (for example, post) + object (for example, another person or post). I was able to keep up with Messina’s presentation to this point, but his explanation of why these tags are better were over my head.

One person in the crowd said that Messina’s proposal sounds a lot like the semantic web standard. Messina admitted that the Activity Stream Atom extension is very similar to semantic web, but less ambitious.

Again, so what?

If what Messina is proposing is true and were adopted as a standard, then you could feasible export data from Google Maps into an iPhone app; or import your medical records into your BlackBerry; or broadcast your client’s ad campaign into a range of devices. The freedom to move, share and analyze data would be limited only by the range of devices and platforms available. And I agree that such a paradigm would be at least a step up from the Facebook news feed.