This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Fred Grott. Original Post: Activity Streams Suck Feed Title: GrottWorkShop Feed URL: http://shareme.github.io/atom.xml Feed Description: Android development with a passion for Android, Java, and Agile. Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Fred Grott Latest Posts From GrottWorkShop

The activity stream or feed as a data abstration is almost 20 years old, its time banish them!

If you look at the data abstraction of an activity stream or feed you will find that data structure is almost 20 years old and we have not gotten any smarter. The effective and productive people are using tools, patches, and hacks to currate their activity streams and feeds that they rely upon.

For example, even a sorted feed in which items are rated such as Hacker News by YCombinator is not read productively by viewing the site. A steadily increasing amount of traffic is choosing to have it currated either by a human or automatically and only view those items highlighted by the curration.

Another example is how techmeme rose up as the currated tech news feed. You get to see in a very visual easy way whether or not a converation has sprung up on a tech news item, all within a few seconds.Imagine if you had your social feed say at G+ or FB or Twitter currated like that, would not that be the neatest thing?

And on mobile our screen attention size and our time attention size is smaller than on a desktop or laptop. The future of social on mobile will be a currated social stream. Just as Google finally pulled the plug on non currated feeds such as in the GoogleReader application we need to move forward to a smarter way to activity feeds or streams by automatically currating such things.