[melkjug-dev] melkjug for activity streams

[Philip Ashlock]

I've been thinking a lot about activity streams lately and realized how
powerful melkjug is for managing such things. I would think a melkjug
powered friendfeed <http://friendfeed.com/> would trump the full fire
hose model that friendfeed currently uses. Consider the following proof
of concept <http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/feed_prefs.php>:



An open standard for activity streams is currently under development
(http://activitystrea.ms/) as part of the emerging "Open Stack
<http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/12/the_open_stack.html>"
and I believe parts of it are already being adopted by major players
like Myspace. Internally at TOPP we are beginning to put much more focus
on promoting activity streams as an effort to build co-motivational
features for civic engagement. After talking about this just a moment
ago, Nick BS is setting up a TOPP Labs jug for us to aggregate activity
to display on the upcoming TOPP Labs website. We'll then have a good
filtering system to showcase current twitter feeds, svn commits, wiki
edits, blog comments, planet posts, etc, etc.. This is something we
should seriously think about as we readdress our approach with the
OpenPlans stack. I'm just thinking of ways to bring melkjug's features
into other contexts.

The new melkjug release feels pretty awesome. Do you think we could do
another round of design polish to accompany our promotion of it?

Phil

[Luke Tucker]

Looking more deeply at activity stream specs, I like this application
of it a lot actually... we could do something pretty nice with the
well defined types of actions and types -- more specialized, less
general.

As for general design polish, I think things are in a pretty good spot
for re-visiting / polishing.

- Luke

Post by Philip Ashlock
I've been thinking a lot about activity streams lately and realized
how powerful melkjug is for managing such things. I would think a
melkjug powered friendfeed would trump the full fire hose model that
<Picture 1.png>
An open standard for activity streams is currently under development
(http://activitystrea.ms/) as part of the emerging "Open Stack" and
I believe parts of it are already being adopted by major players
like Myspace. Internally at TOPP we are beginning to put much more
focus on promoting activity streams as an effort to build co-
motivational features for civic engagement. After talking about this
just a moment ago, Nick BS is setting up a TOPP Labs jug for us to
aggregate activity to display on the upcoming TOPP Labs website.
We'll then have a good filtering system to showcase current twitter
feeds, svn commits, wiki edits, blog comments, planet posts, etc,
etc.. This is something we should seriously think about as we
readdress our approach with the OpenPlans stack. I'm just thinking
of ways to bring melkjug's features into other contexts.
The new melkjug release feels pretty awesome. Do you think we could
do another round of design polish to accompany our promotion of it?
Phil

[Philip Ashlock]

Wonderful to hear. If you haven't read it already, this post on
readwriteweb
<http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_facebook_myspace_activitystreams.php>
offers a little more insight to what's happening in this space - with
videos to boot. There's also a demonstration of how OAuth would make
this use case of melkjug much more robust - as it would allow you to
access activity streams that aren't public.

I'll be at an informal meet-up with the people who are orchestrating
this stuff on sunday at sxsw (including most of the people from that
meeting in january - with activity stream folks from facebook, google,
microsoft, etc). So if anyone has specific ideas about what melkjug
brings to this table, please let me know. The fact that it offers fine
tuning and is open source is a pretty significant point. Facebook
provides some tuning and there are some basic open source activity
stream apps out there: http://noserub.com, http://sweetcron.com,
http://kakuteru.com/

I have quite a bit on my plate right now, but I'd really like to
re-approach some design/UI stuff with melkjug soon. I'm thinking I'd
need about two weeks from now to be free to contribute much.
<http://noserub.com>
-phil

Post by Luke Tucker
Looking more deeply at activity stream specs, I like this application
of it a lot actually... we could do something pretty nice with the
well defined types of actions and types -- more specialized, less
general.
As for general design polish, I think things are in a pretty good spot
for re-visiting / polishing.
- Luke

Post by Philip Ashlock
I've been thinking a lot about activity streams lately and realized
how powerful melkjug is for managing such things. I would think a
melkjug powered friendfeed <http://friendfeed.com/> would trump the
full fire hose model that friendfeed currently uses. Consider the
following proof of concept
<Picture 1.png>
An open standard for activity streams is currently under development
(http://activitystrea.ms/) as part of the emerging "Open Stack
<http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/12/the_open_stack.html>"
and I believe parts of it are already being adopted by major players
like Myspace. Internally at TOPP we are beginning to put much more
focus on promoting activity streams as an effort to build
co-motivational features for civic engagement. After talking about
this just a moment ago, Nick BS is setting up a TOPP Labs jug for us
to aggregate activity to display on the upcoming TOPP Labs website.
We'll then have a good filtering system to showcase current twitter
feeds, svn commits, wiki edits, blog comments, planet posts, etc,
etc.. This is something we should seriously think about as we
readdress our approach with the OpenPlans stack. I'm just thinking of
ways to bring melkjug's features into other contexts.
The new melkjug release feels pretty awesome. Do you think we could
do another round of design polish to accompany our promotion of it?
Phil