Glueing together the social web

Posted on | July 4, 2010 |

activitystreamslogo Someday soon you may see this cryptic new icon on some of your favourite sites. It represents a new standard–a micro-format to be exact–that describes one thing: what you’re doing to whom on the social web.

The standard, known as Activity Streams, aims to solve the problem of bringing together what your friends are doing from all over the web. They may be posting pictures to Flickr and Picassa, microblogging at Twitter, liking things of Facebook, recommending articles at their favorite news sites, etc.

Now this will take an open standard and COLLABORATION from all the parties involved and Activity Streams is already being tested by Facebook, MySpae, Windows Live, Google Buzz, BBC, Opera, Typepad, Gowalla, Hulu and others.

The benefits of Activity Streams include staying in touch across the web, an open, emergent ecosystem, filtering, search, automation and stats and the ability to coalesce and merge content from friends. This would be highly beneficial to the user - you and me. And can only happen with COLLABORATION from parties who in many cases are in direct competition with each other - yet all can see what’s good for the user will ultimately be good for them - higher order digital marketing thinking.

And it’s possible that, with the aid of intelligent filtering, you’ll be able to get as much–or as little–information about your friends and family as you like - putting you in control of your social network and sharing of information - just the way it should be.