An activity stream is a list of recent activities performed by an individual, typically on a single website. For example, Facebook's News 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. The Activity Streams project, for example, is an effort to develop an activity stream protocol to syndicate activities across social Web applications.[2] Several major websites with activity stream implementations have already opened up their activity streams to developers to use, including Facebook and MySpace.[3][4]
Though activity stream arises from social networking, nowadays it has become an essential part[5] of business software. Enterprise social software is used in different types of companies to organize their internal communication and acts as an important addition to traditional corporate intranet. Such major collaboration software like Jive Software, Yammer, eXo Platform or Chatter offer activity stream as a separate product. At the same time other major software providers, such as tibbr, Central Desktop and Wrike offer activity stream as an integrated part of their collaboration software solution.[6][7]
Traction TeamPage Release 5.0 adds activity streams to Enterprise 2.0 social software platform[9]
Ektron CMS400.NET Release 8.0 adds activity streams to its social software suite[10]
Trilog Group ProjExec 5.0 brings the Project Wall and Social Project Management to the IBM Platform[11]
Foragr Activity Stream unifies Facebook likes, Twitter retweets, Disqus comments, IntenseDebate comments, and WordPress posts into one stream for those running on WordPress or other platforms[12]