Alex tipped me off to Stowe’s post on Action Streams (link below). I’ve heard these streams be called many things, but the concept is that as we go through our lives, interact with services and people, we leave a contrail of actions behind us.
Link: /Message: Action Streams And The Next Cycle In The Social Revolution:
The proliferation of hundreds — perhaps thousands — of highly specific social applications that will produce streams derived from people’s activities, writings, and media is leading to a fragmentation of web identity and social connection.
I’ve been harping about this for a long time, in one way or another (even more so, recently). Actions streams are not the Next Thing, but became big in 2007 with Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook (the news feeds), Tumblr and the like* Needless to say, I have been having a ton of discussions lately, much like Stowe, as to how then does this get organized and presented to our social network and the public. For example, in my discussions, we have been trying to build models for how to categorize the value of streams, to understand when, how, and what folks want to spew out or follow. Also, being mobile-minded, I am trying to figure out the role of the mobile device, as a sensor**, in contributing to these streams.
How we take these Action Streams and make them useful is the Big Thing of 2008. Clearly Stowe is thinking of how to do this. So am I (or at least, what I have been thinking has been passed on to the Ovi team).
To me, the developments above have been stressing the linear and location model of the Web. We need to fix it.
Also, Stowe laments the ‘dumbing-down’ of these action streams (next quote). We need to, not only make these actions streams smarter, but we need to make them two way. Only then will the flow be truly hyper-connected.
I get an RSS stream from Dopplr, for example, and plug it into my blog as a widget. However, the blog technology knows nothing about it, and the various trips that Dopplr is streaming don’t flow into my blog’s RSS feed. And should they? After all, Dopplr has a well-defined sharing model within the application, which allows me to share trip information in a controlled fashion. Exporting it outside of the context of Dopplr means that those controls are lost.
I hope to have many wonderful discussions about this at LIFT.
*Stowe was set off by Six Apart releasing a Actions Streams plug-in for MovableType. To me, that just means that the concept of aggregating actions streams is becoming accepted and more available. Also, I have a friend who is building a service to turn Second Life actions into bloggable streams.
**Paul Saffo points out that sensors are the next big thing in tech.
