[OSM-talk] User activity stream - progress update

[Paweł Paprota]

Hi Tobias,

Thank you very much for your response!

> 
> 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
> 

Wow, these are some great ideas. I really had a hard time coming up with
more possible activities than just the obvious ones (diary entries,
changesets).

> 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. ;))
> 

Hmm, this is a good point. I used calendar events on Facebook several
times and it is rather outside of the activity stream / news feed (or
whatever they call it).

Activity stream only contains activities like "User X is going to attend
event Y" - but this would require some mechanism so users are able to
say "I'm going to that event" and for now I think this is out of scope
for a simple activity stream.

> 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?
> 

I think that having user's activity stream exposed as RSS/ATOM is one of
the basic requirements, it is easy to implement (once the server is
implemented :-).

Turning RSS/ATOM into activities would be an interesting feature. Some
questions already in my mind - how to recognize which users are
interested in a given RSS item? Does the whole RSS feed go to all users?

> 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.
> 

Currently the idea for the activity server is to make it as simple as
possible - it is not even aware of OSM users, their friend lists, their
home location.

Currently the responsibility of addressing the activity lies with the
activity publisher. So an application has to say to the server:

"User X created new diary entry. Notify users A, B and C about this"

This greatly simplifies the server implementation but on the other hand
puts more responsibility on the activity publisher. 

In the light of your message and requirements that you mentioned I (and
perhaps other developers can comment as well) need to rethink the
approach here. Perhaps it would make more sense to make the activity
server aware of OSM users and then the publisher would just say:

"User X created new diary entry."

And the server would find X's home location, friends and distribute the
activity accordingly.

Thanks again for your message, as you can see the implementation is in
very early stages and new ideas is extremely important because it shapes
the technical details.

Paweł