IIW #8 - Computer Science Museum - Mountain View - May 18th to 20th 

Sessions:

• Monday: Filtering the noise in the Activity Streams 
  • Goal: To come up with a solution of how we can surface the proper content without overwhelming the user with selecting a multitude of settings ==> Sensory detection
  • Ideas:
    • I explained the weighting algorithm which purges items from surfacing on the stream which are not relevant enough to the user. Relevancy can be summed up in:
      • How interested I am in the author
      • How interested I am in the subject
        • How does it relate to me ?
        • How many friends have done the same activity ?
      • How much others liked the subject or author
      • Did I already read this ?
    • LinkedIn attendee (pardon my recollection on name) discussed how his software attempts to solve the issue by making the interface Friend focused vs Timeline focused for users with fewer friends
    • When the stream provides a lot of distinct information that cannot be easily filtered we can at least provide in context blocking of the activity. Make it go away !
    • Daniela Barbosa also contributed mentioning that we should allow the user to very simply define subjects to block. Ex given was "Food" would then block any tweets from friends describing their breakfast.
    • Chimp attendee (pardon my recollection on name) wanted the stream surfacing to react to his personal activities on his desktop. For example if reasearching digital cameras on another browser window the stream would then display anything containing that data.
    • Of course all these settings need to be able to be overridden.
  • http://iiw.idcommons.net/Filtering_the_Noise_in_the_Activity_Streams - Luke Shepard took notes but I think they still need to be submitted.
  • Conclusion is that there is consensus in sensory detection of settings.

• Tuesday: Informal Discussion with Chris Messina, Martin Atkins, David Recordon, Ari Steingberg and myself. Topics discussed

  • Having two verbs needed for depicting a bidirectional friendship creation activity 
    • Martin made changes here: http://github.com/apparentlymart/activity-streams-specs/commit/be6587f30f45b7ad25b784c20183ad80c9f8da78 and http://github.com/apparentlymart/activity-streams-specs/commit/4e2362c36a1ec858b4ae68b421b1127bd5ed265e
    • TODO: Confirm via mailing list these changes
• Tuesday: http://iiw.idcommons.net/Activity_Strea.ms - Ray Valdes took notes and I think they still need to be submitted 
  • Several attendees reviewed the existing progress: Joseph Smarr, Martin, Messina, Keller, Seely and more
  • Came up with concept of annotation to be used when sharing a video
  • Wrote down list of contextual attributes for an activity: Via and Location.
  • Decorators: Mood, Rating, Annotation, Kudos
  • I am not sure everyone understood why we are making a distinction
  • 
• Wednesday: http://iiw.idcommons.net/Activity_Streams%2C_Twitter_API%2C_Facebook%2C_Open_Social%2C_Yahoo%21_Updates - Monica Keller took notes which are posted here http://wiki.activitystrea.ms/Microformats-for-Activities