Action streams: a blue sky proposal

Posted by Adrian Chan on February 18, 2010 Go to comments

Last fall after visiting with the activity streams group I spent a bit of time brainstorming what I’m calling action streams. As I lack the resources to pursue the idea for any meaningful length of time, I’m tossing it into the open here. (6 pp pdf).

The basic idea is for a distributed and decentralized stream schema that would permit posts not only to share activity updates across social networks, but to enable action within and around those posts also. Think twitter with buttons. An invite comes into the twitter stream, and Seesmic renders it with buttons so that you can reply with accept, decline, or maybe.

Posts could of course accommodate many different formats, including commercial and transactional formats. State would have to be captured and shared across posts where they appear, in as realtime as possible. I have no technical insight into the feasibility of this, so I can offer little more here than a breakdown of the idea.

If this were possible, it would make for an interesting evolution in streams overall. No longer would status updates be reports of activity, statements and messages incapable of hooking up to actions. Actions would be possible inline with the post and use simple UI elements as commonly used today. We could actually do stuff with our posts. And get system confirmation of activity at the other end.

Related:
Social and conversational implications of cross-referenced activity streams

Design, Streams,
  • No doubt there would be challenges. But the payoff to everyone involved, if we can move from one-way and isolated updates to a world of updates/responses specified by action meta structure and data would rock indeed!
  • Awesome Chris -- I have more to contribute. I spent a while looking into this after coming up with the idea. Nice to see it getting traction!
  • Love the idea! I've been working in the field of B2B / B2C / business application for more than a decade, and this could work - and should, being a Twitterholic myself

    Don't have much time now so just leaving this here, basically what's needed is global uniqueness for senders and recipients (i.e. users), actions and activities and posts (i.e. messages). You're jumping from idea to UI, steps in between should be technical and functional

    Sure as heck would rock though, although The Bounce (auto-reply-to-all) is a potential killer
  • I've started documenting this idea here:

    http://wiki.activitystrea.ms/Actions

    Feel free to contribute!
  • Exactly. And continuing the riff, I think that the avatar can play a role in the UI, being the perfect metaphor for "me" and therefore as "me and my invitation". Did you notice how in Wave the presence LED, usually found on the roster is placed on the avatar?

    I'm a bit obsessed with avatars of late :-) To wit, I have just launched a little experiment with what I have dubbed pixelated metadata, http://www.twavatars.com . I would be honored if you were to have a look and tell me what you think. (It's the same tool that @kevinmarks used on his latest twavatar...)

    Your comments on the Tummelvision show with respect to the subject of faces were excellent, so I get the feeling that you can see where this is heading.
  • Yep. I'm seeing a format in which the status update/tweet is essentially a text field around which are additional UI elements permitting the update to be useful and by means of which it would be identified as a type of statement/request/invitation/question/recommendation or so on. And then rendered at the other end, using shared formats such as accomplished by activitystrea.ms
  • Interesting idea...it would seem to require that each post enter the stream with a packet of metadata (I am an invitation, I am an advertisement, I am a news story, etc.). In some cases, these could be added automatically depending on the origin of the source, in others as a result of authors adding their own tags and finally via AI parsing. Of course spammers would game this system, so the solution would have to be really smart to be useful ;-)
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