W3C Activity Streams Research

What is W3C?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.

What is Activity Streams?

Activity Streams (also known as news feed) is an open format specification for activity stream protocols, which are used to syndicate activities taken in social web applications and services, similar to those in Facebook's, Instagram's and Twitter's.
The standard provides a general way to represent activities. For instance "Jack added Hawaii to his list places to visit". Would be represented as actor:jack, verb:add, object:Hawaii, target:placestovisit.

Little "a" activity streams : are a UI paradigm for displaying recent activity within a context. Activities are typically displayed in reverse chronological order and consist of relatively simple statements such as "John uploaded a new photo" or "12 people liked Sally's post".
Big "A" Activity Streams : is a data format for encoding and transferring activity/event metadata. The first version of the specification was published in 2011 by the independent Activity Streams Working Group and is based on extending Atom. The current (2.0+) version of the spec is JSON-based.

What is aimed by developing Activity Streams?

The main purpose was to create web standards so that websites look and work the same in all web browsers. Herewith, the World Wide Web would reach its full potential and its long-term growth would be ensured. W3C's primary focus is developing protocols and guidelines for key aspects of the web ranging from HTML and CSS coding to web architecture, XLM technology, web devices, and web browsing and authoring tools.

Why Activity Stream is useful?

1. Activites increase engagement.
2. Scable
3. More meaningful data

More Reading

https://getstream.io/blog/designing-activity-stream-newsfeed-w3c-spec/

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_Streams_(format)
https://www.w3.org/wiki/Activity_Streams
https://www.w3.org/Consortium/