Although ActivityStreams are typically focused on of-the-moment activities in a stream, there is a more interesting and lasting value to preserving activities over time. To assist in providing context to historical activities, one possible addition to the ActivityStreams format is an attribute that indicates a contextual portrait or profile photo of an actor — relevant at the time an activity took place.
Certain services already support the preservation of profile photos over time, which may indicate some kind of timely relationship between the appearance of the profile photo, or simply indicate that the actor has aged over time.
Examples
Digg
Facebook
Gravatar
iChat
Yahoo Mash
Examples of Contextual Profile Photos
mobile.twitter.com
DailyBooth
Related Links
Relevant mailing list threads:
Proposed solutions
Adding startDate and endDate attributes to Portable Contacts
One solution seems to amend Portable Contacts, since that's where the photos, as Kevin Marks points out, should actually come from (since we'd want to have historical photos for people-as-objects as well, rather than just actors).
As additional properties to any of the plural elements in PoCo, we could simply add the "startDate" and "endDate" attributes to specify the time period when certain metadata was applicable... for example, I have many outdated email addresses for friends — and LinkedIn lets me associate myself with several corporate email addresses that I no longer own... (i.e. chris@flock.com). Adding start and end dates to these attributes would enable this type of history preservation without disturbing existing implementations, which can just presume that an image is the canonical representation if no start or end date is specified.
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