-1
Activiity streams is a neat idea, and a few years ago when the protocol started it was promising in that it was an early embracer of the JSON paradigm. JSON, imho, is an excellent choice for developers in that you can easily serialize it into most languages.
However, activity streams is often marketed as the "one serialization to rule them all", which I think is inaccurate. Indeed, I dont think it is even best of breed in its class. Today there are several first class JSON serializations, better engineered, with better interop and with better adoption. Standards often evolve in three steps: plain strings, name spaced strings ie URIs, dereferencable URIs (the web). This is often referred to as 'self describing data'. Timbl has written an excellent essay on this evolution.
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Stack.htmlIn the last few years we've seen an explosion in what is called "linked data". This now has at least half a dozen interoperable JSON serializations, and has been adopted by the G7, World Bank, Municipalities, Cities, Fire Departments, 1000s of businesses, academia, facebook, all major search engines, and grass roots.
There is also the issue of the proprietary nature of activity streams. I would be much happier if they were to put it under creative commons. It is the only spec that I know where it has been delayed in order to get approval form lawyers.
AAIR have made some progress in porting AS to linked data (
http://xmlns.notu.be/aair/ ) and when I spoke to caedes at lorea he said that he thought that was the way to go. I agree with this.
I dont want to be too unkind to AS as my name is on the spec :) But I would consider it one of the weaker serializations that should be supported as legacy, if there is a very compelling reason to do so. Let's try not to be inhibited too much by the legacy we inherit. We can build better, and we can build bigger!