Description

Actions or action links provide additional ways to interact with activities and streamed content. Actions could be automatically attached to know activity-types, or provided as an extension to ActivityStreams 1.0.

Actions were written up in ReadWriteWeb in March 2010.

Prior Art

Facebook has provided the ability to attach arbitrary action links to activities in the Facebook newsfeed.

Proposal

Add to the activity stream json spec a section describing all the actions that can be performed on the activity.
Example:
 "actions": [
            {
               "verb": "http://activitystrea.ms/spec/schema/1.0/comment",
               "permalinkURL": "http://www.facebook.com/100000830988303/posts/5004040193193"
            },
            {

               "verb": "http://activitystrea.ms/spec/schema/1.0/share",
               "permalinkURL": "http://networkedblogs.com/p29227945?a=share"
            }

Ideas

• Undo
• Remove
• Retweet / Reshare / Forward
• Like / Favorite
• Comment
• View Profile
• Add as Friend 

Exploration

Amazon.com

Facebook action links

PetVille

FarmVille

TripIt

Ping.fm

Page Editors

• Chris Messina
• Monica Keller

Action Types

• Adrian Chan

Going forward, I think it might make sense to class actions into:

• system actions
• social actions
• communicative actions

System actions: as in amazon example above, actions on the post that act within a system, be this as a selection, saving, purchasing, etc. Basic first-order stuff.

Social actions: as in the FB example of Liking, a social action that uses a symbolically mediated selection but which can have second-order outcomes. Symbolically-mediated simply means that an icon, codified selection (label), emoticon, vote, rating or other numerical graphically represented numerical selection determines the fixed system value of the action. But the action is socially meaningful and may belong to social interactions and practices. Social actions have social relevance due to the second order processing of actions and representation onscreen as aggregated social activity.

Communicative actions: are linguistic statements or expressions codifed by means of ui elements such as labeled buttons (buy, accept, decline, invite...) or expressions to be parsed or linguistic expressions produced by system messages. Eg the system message "Chris Messina is now following you" might be rendered automatically with a "follow back" button. In the case of parsing, one might imagine that Chris Messina writes/posts "I'm coming after you!", which is parsed as a game move and announced to participants with a system message "Chris Messina is now playing."

Note that system actions do not involve the response or acknowledgment of other users but simply modify a selection. Social actions may be rendered with options by which other users can validate, acknowledge, share, or respond; they would be loosely coupled to responses. Communicative actions would be strictly coupled to responses.

In all cases the matter of notifying or delivering system messages to report actions would have to be dealt with. Users may want a choice over whether or not to publish system actions such as purchases (think Beacon). By contrast, communicative actions are intended to communicate -- the issue then is to or in front of whom (privacy settings? network distribution? friends, twitter). Ditto with email or other notifications insofar as any action could be set to trigger an alert.