Web Evolution: Implementors Needed !

My response to:
Web 3.0 Might Be Really Stupid

Given that the first implementations of the activitystrea.ms standard went live about 2 months ago. I think its premature to call the lack of analytics around this new offering stupid. The analytics are evolving and many of those will be feeding into the recommendations engine. There is a lot of opportunity in this field.

As described in this recent article exploring how friends influence purchases
>> "Moderately connected" users exhibit "keeping up with the Joneses" behavior. On average, this social influence translates into a 5 percent increase in revenues.

Additionally, we should not shy away from investigating hyper targetting and ad placement models. After all every item in your activity stream can be considered a personal ad that you want your followers/friends to read. How to make it more memorable ? How to get the user to interact ?

Incidentally, I was just mentioning to Chris Messina last week that the Activities team at MySpace has already gotten initial approval to provide a user's public activitystrea.ms feed in order to encourage adoption. And no, not because no one wants to consume MySpace's feed.

We have several large partners and don't forget the fact that MySpace has more than 70 million total unique users in the US (as of the March 2009 comScore data). However, I do agree a public feed would provide more portability so we are reviewing this proposal.

Bottom line is we are doing everything possible to promote a smarter web and we need everyone's collaboration. Whether its producing smarter feeds or consuming this feeds and creating another consumable a bi-product. Stop pondering on how far others will get and jump on the implementors side.