"a format for syndicating social activities around the web"

I had no idea this existed. Or maybe I just didn't care when I heard about it the first time. Supported by Facebook, Google, MySpace; not used by LinkedIn.

From the rationale:

And if I haven’t made it clear what I’m talking about, well, we’re starting with an assumption that activities (like the ones in Facebook’s newsfeed and that make up the bulk of FriendFeed’s content) are kind of like the synaptic electrical impulses that make social networking work. Consider that people probably read more Twitter content these days than they do conventional blog posts — if only because, with so much more content out there, we need more smaller bite-sized chunks of information in order to cope.

So starting there, we need to look at what it would take to recreate efficient and compelling interfaces for activity streams like we’re used to on FriendFeed and Facebook, but without the benefit of having ever seen any of the services before.

In other words, how can we make the user the center of gravity again, instead of a bunch of applications that want to own the user.

Exciting!

movieos: "I'd buy a magazine in digital form if it came bundled as an Instapaper-powered list of articles, each of which tracked if I'd read them, and how far down I'd scrolled, synchronized this state with all my other iOS devices, and had associated images cached locally, and offered convenient 'tweet this article' functionality."

It makes sense to have different interfaces for consuming different types of content, I'm not suggesting this should be done in a typical feed reader. But no reason feed readers shouldn't implement these features.

Since moving to San Francisco and talking to people about joining the tech industry, I've been asked several times "so, what would you find it exciting to work on?" When I answer "feeds - you know, RSS, Atom that kind of thing" I invariably get a blank look. Maybe if I develop my thoughts I'll do a better job communicating my enthusiasm.

I use a feed reader daily. I use it to keep up with blogs that I'm interested in, of course. I've written before about how it changes the definition of a high-value blog, from high-volume to good signal to noise ratio.

That's the canonical geek use case for feeds. It's not going to take the world by storm, even with simpler tools.

But there are other things I use feeds for. I use them for anything that I want to check regularly that has a feed available:

• My friends' Flickr photos (based on my Flickr contacts)
• Comments on my Flickr photos
• Local events (based on my last.fm profile)
• Comments on MetaFilter threads that I care about
• Trips my friends are taking (through Dopplr)

This is starting to look a lot like Facebook, right? And one way to look at Facebook is a feed reader in a social context. The design is nicer than MySpace's, but what really distinguishes Facebook is that central news feed. "Like" is a really simple method of subscribing to a feed, and becoming friends with someone subscribes you to multiple feeds about their activity.

Facebook's popularity means that hundreds of millions of people are looking at a feed reader every day. Many of the applications built on the platform are only possible because it's such a good interface for consuming feeds. Suffice to say I don't think Facebook is a fad that's going to die out. People's activity online is increasingly going to revolve around subscribing to, consuming and interacting with feeds.

But short of building a Facebook competitor, what are the opportunities for cool new applications? Watch this space.