An activity stream is a list of recent activities performed by an individual, typically on a single website. For example, Facebook's News Feed is an activity stream. Since the introduction of the News Feed on September 6, 2006, other major websites have introduced similar implementations for their own users. Since the proliferation of activity streams on websites, there have been calls to standardize the format so that websites could interact with a stream provided by another website. The Activity Streams project, for example, is an effort to develop an activity stream protocol to syndicate activities across social Web applications. Several major websites with activity stream implementations have already opened up their activity streams to developers to use, including Facebook and MySpace.
Though activity stream arises from social networking, nowadays it has become an essential part of business software. Enterprise social software is used in different types of companies to organize their internal communication and acts as an important addition to traditional corporate intranet. Such major collaboration software like Jive Software, Yammer, eXo Platform or Chatter offer activity stream as a separate product. At the same time other major software providers, such as tibbr, Central Desktop, Bitrix and Wrike offer activity stream as an integrated part of their collaboration software solution.
Activity streams come in two different variations: Generic and personalized feeds. In generic feeds, all users see the same content in the activity stream. In the personalized activity stream, each user gets bespoke items as well as custom ranking of each element in the feed.