A stream ofTwitter posts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture
Anactivity stream is a list of recent activities performed by an individual, typically on a singlewebsite. For example,Facebook'sNews Feed is an activity stream. Since the introduction of the News Feed on September 6, 2006,[1] other major websites have introduced similar implementations for their own users. Since the proliferation of activity streams on websites, there have been calls to standardize the format so that websites could interact with a stream provided by another website. TheActivity Streams project, for example, is an effort to develop an activity streamprotocol to syndicate activities acrosssocial web applications.[2] Several major websites with activity stream implementations have already opened up their activity streams to developers to use, including Facebook andMySpace.[3][4]
Though activity stream arises fromsocial networking, nowadays it has become an essential part[5] ofbusiness software.Enterprise social software is used in different types of companies to organize their internal communication and acts as an addition to traditional corporate intranet. Collaboration software likeJive Software,Yammer, andChatter offer activity stream as a separate product. At the same time other software providers such astibbr,Central Desktop, andWrike offer activity stream as an integrated part of their collaboration software solution.[6][7]
Activity streams come in two different variations:
Generic feeds: all users see the same content in the activity stream.
Personalised feeds: each user gets bespoke items as well as custom ranking of each element in the feed.
