Everybody talks about filtering the real-time stream of information online but the Activity Streams community is the place where those conversations go on between leading engineers at the world's biggest and smallest social networks, with the goal of replacing the "walled garden" model of social networking with an open, interoperable communication marketplace. If Activity Streams succeeds, you will be able to subscribe to and filter the activities of your friends across multiple different networks, without having to sign-up for or even ever have heard of those other networks. This is almost the equivelent of AT&T phones being able to make calls to Verizon phones. Of rail-transport companies being able to ship goods across the country over different railroad networks - because the rails for the trains to run on are the same size. It's different though, because of the granular filtering by type of activity. Applications built on top of Activity Streams will allow the equivilent of a phone that only accepts phone calls about certain subjects from certain people. Because of course, we're now recieving a lot more inbound communication than we did in the era of the telephone. "The real-time river of news makes information available to you as it is created," Messina told us, "but you need a way to consume it that respects your time, enhances the content or makes it easier to consume. The Activity Streams format aims to allow people to recieve a stream in a way that they can manage." - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Can't wait. And no redundancies, please. - Laura N

Will be interesting to see how much granularity over permissions the content creators will have. Will I have to just choose "yes" or "no" that anyone who is connected to me anywhere will be allowed to see my stuff? How could greater control work - seems complicated. - Laura N

Seems a fair point Laura. - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Here's a fractal I use that may be useful as a template for Activity Streams... 1) interest-generating opener 2) background on current threats/tension to resolve 3) opportunity or vision of a better state 4) strategy w/steps to get there 5) issues to solve before accepting strategy 6) next steps by stakeholders - Mark Frazier

This is awesome Marshall. I'm wondering whether we broaden the concept beyond messaging to decentralize the social graph itself, so app developers can leverage existing relationships without having to build on top of a facebook or a twitter...(or perhaps that is implied here?) - Tony Zito

Marshall ... thanks for the initial explanation... I've been intrigued by all the references to Activity Streams and http://activitystrea.ms/ by people I know and trust - I just haven't had the time to join another mailing list. Just yesterday I was on the site trying to understand more and reading Chris Messina's almost-year-old post: http://factoryjoe.com/blog... - Dan York

Will this "first draft" evolve into a RWW post? - Dan York

Dan, it's for our forthcoming research report on the real-time web and its future. Preorders avail at http://www.readwriteweb.com/reports... - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Do you have a pointer to an example activity stream feed? - Dave Winer

there's an example at the bottom of http://wiki.developer.myspace.com/index... - Marshall Kirkpatrick

I should find a better example than that, a live one to include in article. - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Interesting. I've been unplugged from the feed / activity space for a while now. Makes me want to read up more on Activity Streams. - mikepk

That would be the first thing a developer would look for, something live they could build an app on. - Dave Winer

Tom's activity feed URL at MySpace is http://api.myspace.com/v1... but MySpace API authentication is required - looking for a live and publicly accessible one - Marshall Kirkpatrick

aha! cliqset doesn't require authentication to see theirs, http://cliqset.com/feed... - Marshall Kirkpatrick

I wish more specifications came with live, official, reference implementations. - mikepk