Activity Streams

Activity Streams

There is no doubt that feeds and social networks go along together very well. I even argued that building a social application without feeds and PubSubHubbub was a mistake. Today, we’re announcing that Superfeedr is now able to parse ActivityStreams data! We decided to add this to our schema (like we did a few weeks ago for GeoRSS).

Even if atom entries are the smallest common denominator to describe online content, it’s now obvious that they’re not allowing us to represent fully the richness of social data.

If you’re not familiar with it. Here is a small intro to Activity Streams.

They’re supported by a lot of the big social players, including Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, Google Buzz, Opera, TypePad, Gowalla

They extends the regular atom entries, by adding 2 nodes: verbs and object. The author information can also be extended.
With this, it is possible to represent almost any action done by a specific user: Julien commented on a blog post. Astro was tagged in a picture. John friended Andy.

Soon, we will start to extrapolate ActivityStreams data out of non-as data, and then, all the data that you’ll get from Superfeedr will be ActivityStream!

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On the same topic, check embed and customize river.news , full text rss and rss or atom, not both!.

Previously, on the Superfeedr blog: Ruby Fibers may confuse.