[OSM-talk] User activity stream - progress update

[Tobias Knerr]

On 30.09.2012 18:53, Paweł Paprota wrote:
> The idea is simple enough: applications can publish activities to the
> Activity Server and the server in turn is able to serve user's activity
> stream - so Rails Port would retrieve such stream to display it on the
> user page for example.

Brainstorm of things I would find interesting in a stream follows:

- activity from other *.osm.org services (forum, help, wiki watchlist)
- posts from blogs.osm.org (not unlike diaries, but hosted externally)
- releases of OSM-related software the mapper uses / is interested in
- local media featuring OSM - basically, an integrated regionally
filtered view of http://wiki.osm.org/OpenStreetMap_in_the_media
- upcoming calendar events (http://wiki.osm.org/Template:Calendar),
again filtered by geographical area

As for the upcoming events, does that even fit the "activity" concept?
It seems a bit redundant to expect people to repeatedly remind you of a
known future event when you could just automatically generate a list of
upcoming events in the area. (But then I'm not really into that "social"
thing. ;))

Some of of what I mentioned above should already be available as RSS
feeds. How hard will it be to turn a feed into "activities", and vice versa?

And finally, another question: Will your server be able to do filtering
by geographic location? That is, can an application just add some
coordinate or bounding polygon to an activity, so it will be distributed
to the relevant users (maybe based on the home location these have set
on osm.org) by your server? Doing this would seem like a common requirement.

Tobias