Activity Streams and the Distributed Social Network

Back in September I wrote a post about "One Open Feed for All of My Social Communications" which outlined aggregating multiple Social feeds like twitter, identi.ca and friendfeed into one stream.

Well I am glad to report that we appear to be getting closer to making this happen. Last week, in the Six Apart offices in California, there was a lively discussion about Activity Streams, which was covered by posts like these:

• Where we’re going with Activity Streams
• Live Blogging from the Activity Streams Meetup
• Google, Facebook, MySpace and More Meet to Talk Activity Streams
• Working Toward Activity Stream Standards
• DiSO Activity streams standard

Representatives for Six-Apart, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, and many others outlined what it would take to create a interface for activity streams similar to the streams used by Friendfeed and Facebook, with the intent of outlining the standards and API's necessary for application builders to deliver social content to distributed aggregators as well as outlining the resources and data needed to manage, share and police that content on the end user side.

For more information on Activity Streams, here is a nice overview presented by Chris Messina at the Open Stack meetup in December:

Moving Forward

Its great to see multiple organizations coming together and working on a set of standards that will help us move forward with a set of tools that will aggregate our social data and share it a secure manner.

Another recent recommendation that I really like is from Marc Canter and the DiSO Project. Marc outlines a Social Dashboard that could be used to aggregate, share and manage our social identity and data. Mark's dashboard outline can be found here .....  DiSO Dashboard Outline proposal, and a second post about the dashboard can be found here "Outlines as a structure for distributed friending".

In my opinion, agreeing on a set of standard API's that can be integrated into new and current Social Tools, will open the possibilities for the client side dashboards, widgets and mobile applications and will help to build and extend our social presence.

Technorati Tags: Activity Streams,DiSO,Social Networking