During 2009 Windows Live implemented consumption of Activity Streams feeds for Facebook, MySpace, and a number of other partners as part of its "Web Activiites" integrations. There are over 70 Web Activities available since November 2009 and many of these integrations leverage Activity Streams.
Timeline:
- January 2009 - Microsoft CEO Stevel Ballmers announces Windows Live / Faceook integration in his CES Keynote speech:
- "Second, we're announcing a partnership with Facebook that will deliver the best social experience to our over half a billion Windows Live users. You can now connect Facebook with Windows Live. The updates you make on Facebook, and the photos you share will automatically also be published to your Windows Live network if you want things configured that way."
- April 2009 - Windows Live / Facebook integration launches built on Facebook's Activity Streams implementation and is announced on the Windows Live team blog
- September 2009 - Windows Live / MySpace integration launches built on MySpace's Activity Streams implementation and is announced on the Windows Live team blog
- September 2009 - Windows Live team member, Rob Dolin posted on the Live Services blog about how Activity Streams addresses challenges with Web Activities integrations:
- "First, instead of having to do a custom mapping for practically every Web Activities partner, with an open standard like Activity Streams, we can build a single mapping that can be used by multiple partners.
Second, Activity Streams includes <activity:verb> and <activity:object-type> elements so we can identify that one <entry> is a status update and another is a blog entry. Thus, services that have multiple activity types (like MySpace) can have a single feed that includes photos, status, blogs, music, and more."
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November 2009 - Windows Live team member Jeff Kunins announced the launch of 19 additional web activity partners, shares how Activity Streams enables partnerships, and references about a dozen additional implementations:
- "Windows Live is a co-author and active participant in the Activity Streams standards, an effort for safely exchanging activity feed content (with user opt-in) among sites and client applications. The spec is being co-authored by representatives from Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft (us), SixApart, and the DiSo project. Many other key companies like Google, Yahoo, and Netflix are participants and contributors as well.
- Activity Streams make it easy for partner sites to expose feed information or activity from their sites in a consistent format, once, so that their customers can import or connect what they’re doing on that site to other major services like Windows Live, MySpace, Facebook, etc. without their needing to implement service-specific tweaks to their feed. Likewise, service endpoints like Windows Live can expose a standard endpoint rather than implementing and maintaining custom feed ingestion for every partner.
- Windows Live is already consuming Activity Streams-compliant feeds from Facebook, MySpace, and about a dozen other of the current web activity partners who have begun publishing using the Activity Streams standard."