Startup Opportunity: the Activity Platform
This is an idea I’ve been toying with the last couple of months after working a lot on integrating Twitter, gathering RSS feeds and implementing an activity stream for iknow.co.jp.
When talking about Twitter over a couple of drinks, my friends often roll up their eyeballs. Again, this idiot evangelizing this ‘look-at-me’ service. In a way they are right, Twitter has limited value for it’s users. But the thing that I found most interesting about Twitter is the potential of activity streams and the machine-to-human aspects of it. In my previous article on how to build a Twitter service, I concluded that Twitter has severe limits when it comes to general activity streaming.
But guess what, activity is still HOT and serious innovation here is the new gold.
Activity Streams?
After sites like Plaxo, more and more websites are restructuring certain areas of their sites to facilitate ‘acitivty streams’. LinkedIn just introduced one:
Only a few weeks before 37Signals made this update to my Backpack account:
These activity streams are still kind of vaguely defined some call it Newsroom, Latest Activity or Updates. Here in Tokyo we have many different names for it: ‘notifications’ in programming code, ‘Activity’ on one page and ‘My News/マイニュース’ on the other.
Nevertheless we can extract some simple facts from this almost natural occurring phenomenon:- Events are plotted along a timeline and serve as news flashes.
- They include updates about friends or followee’s.
- They notify you about system events (new message, you have listened to 1000 songs, congratulations!)
- They serve as call to actions: read this message, checkout this blog entry etc. This serves as a social and content creation lubricant.
Lifestreaming?
This word is flooding today’s buzztalk. Applications like friendfeed.com and tumblr.com basically allow you to aggregate stuff from other services and republish that in one big ass activity stream.
However, there are big flaws in most of these services:- They are not updated real-time, they poll external services and passively retrieve new updates.
- If they have filter/categorization capabilities at all, they provide that functionality through their site and not the actual API.
- They focus on social events and omit the upcoming wave of recommendation engine notifications.
- Actively syndicating events through eg XMPP is still hard to find.
- Their paradigm is Software as a Service rather than Platform as a Service
an Open Activity Platform
I think there will be a need to fire off all these notifications into some sort of standardized activity broker. Such an Activity Broker should have these core responsibilities:- Providing categorization and call-to-action hooks for notifications.
- Providing authentication for external services and easy access ways.
- Sophisticated filtering mechanisms for users.
- Allowing real-time pushing of these incoming notifications to third party services.
I’m not really aware of current standardization drafts that accommodate these – perhaps DataPortability.org will do the job. But standards like oAuth, JSON and XMPP play in very well with the implementation of such a platform.
Interestingly – while searching for a suitable home for such a platform – I discovered the domain openactivity.org has already been taken by a certain company from Redmond:
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Domain Name:OPENACTIVITY.ORG Registrant Name:Sean Lyndersay Registrant Street1:One Microsoft Way Registrant City:Redmond Registrant Email:seanlynd@microsoft.com |
Skinning the Platform
The other side of the coin is the tools that plug into this Open Activity Broker.User added value will lay in tools that provide display and control very well. Lifestreamers and the like should be mere frontends. Secondly, tremendous value can be added by plugging in recommendation engines and integrating with existing services.
I haven’t done a thorough comparison of current lifestream-like applications out there, but I do have some ideas for such an Activity Frontend. The core value will be sophisticated filtering and categorization on incoming notifications. A filter like that should be organic eg. voting down certain sources or notification types. Right now I’m following about 50 people on Twitter and I don’t have time to give any attention to this public timeline – I need to easily and seriously filter the noise!
During one of my takout-sushi lunches I made the above mockup. The important filtering/categorization controls are missing, because building those will require serious thinking about user interaction. Techniques like Comet) can make this web application real-time (pushing notifications on the page as they happen).
Also, integration with the Desktop world is an interesting prospective. As the platform should play well with current open standards like XMPP, so should the frontend play well with open UI libraries like Growl (or Snarl for windows and Ghosd for Linux):
a Project has been Born?
Not yet, although I can probably not resist writing some prototypes. However, for something like this to really work well – there needs to be some kind of community actively backing the non-profit part, the Open Activity Broker. This will require a lot of commitment making the whole package a fulltime gig.
Any takers? Or any tips that this is just reinventing the wheel? Please share your thoughts.
6 Responses to “Startup Opportunity: the Activity Platform”
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Great article! I agree very much on the filtering aspect of the stream. You mentioned having to check 50 people on Twitter, I have a similar problem with my RSS feeds: there's just too many of them and it takes a long time to check them all. Of course, you could go all Zenhabits here, but in the end, people are lazy. If you can somehow rank/filter the incoming info, you're on to something. Unfortunately, that's also the hard part.
For instance, I'm a mathematician, and thus interested in maths. However I'm afraid to use the current RSS filters, because they are based on keywords. I might miss out on something math-related, just because the article doesn't contain any math* keywords. It would be a hassle to construct a list of keywords like this manually. And with every increase in hassle, the number of people who would potentially use your service decreases exponentially.
Therefore, smart filters/ranking systems/recommendation agents have such huge potential. But I believe they will only become effective in this setting when information can be marked up with meaning (i.e. microformats, RDF, etc.), because it's just too difficult when all your filter has to work with are your keywords (assuming you even went through the hassle of constructing one), and maybe info on people you have an overlap with in your reading list. Maybe a good intermediate solution would be recommendations of keywords (like del.icio.us).
And this is mostly concerning RSS feeds! Imagine having to manually rank your preferences and updating them for all the updates in your lifestream, imagine that hassle. My bet would be on an agent that monitors your attention, i.e. keeps track of the links you click on in your RSS, what Facebook updates you follow up on, what Twitter messages you reply to, and that learns about your preferences and starts to rank stuff as time proceeds. You don't have to expend Zenhabit-like mental effort when deciding whether or not to add a new feed, or a new whatever. You can just add it, and let the agent sort it out for you. A bit further down the road, the agent will add people/stuff for you automatically if it thinks you'll find interesting (asking for your permission first, of course ;-).
Take a look at http://diso-project.org/, they share some similar thoughts.
Totally agree with your thoughts, and i'm surprised that you have the same idea with us. http://planbus.com, chinese life-stream currently in private beta.
Its a great concept - but I am not sure that I can trust a third party to have that kind of info about me.
Similar efforts:
http://www.movabletype.org/2008/01/buildingactionstreams.html
(and the diso project, as Nanek said, they're essentially working on the same thing.)
While I love the idea, you must do something which makes your app stand out from the crowd.
But of course, due to the mass of apps like this, somebodys always gonna have a feature which you "just thought of".
But if you think you can make something which people would use over other apps, go for it!