ReadWriteWeb

The JSON Activity Streams spec has hit a 1.0 release. Activity Streams provides a common protocol for creating and parsing activity streams. The ATOM version was already at 1.0.

The Facebook Wall is probably the most famous example of an activity stream, but just about any application could generate a stream of information in this format. Using a common format for activity streams could enable applications to communicate with one another, and presents new opportunities for information aggregation.

Yammer surged in popularity last year. According to former Yammer Vice President of Marketing Steve Apfelberg, the company experienced triple-digit growth. It also expanded its features beyond just microblogging by adding features such as document editing, idea management and its own app store-like collection of third-party applications.

But integration in "real" enterprise software has always been missing. You can embed Yammer in Microsoft SharePoint, but not much more. That's starting to change: Yammer and ERP software-as-a-service company NetSuite announced today that the two companies are teaming up to enable Yammer users to follow invoices, shipped orders, CRM contacts and other updates from Netsuite.

Enterprise social networking service Yammer today released a new version of its iOS app. The new version adds threaded discussions, private messaging and full Retina Display support. Also, users will now be able to view documents from within the app.

Box (formerly known as Box.net) announced a new version today. It's revamping the user interface, adding discussion tabs to documents, activity streams and an app market. The new version will be rolled out over the next 30 days. It's also working with VMware to integrate Active Directory with Box in order to appeal to larger enterprises.

We are trying some new ways to provide a bit more depth to our coverage. You may notice we are packaging posts to explore topics a bit with interviews, profiles and resources that we hope will give a deeper perspective about cloud computing.

For example, we wrote two posts about business intelligence technologies early last week. And we ended the week with two posts about mobile virtualization. The week before, we promised to do more posts about how e-commerce is being affected by the cloud. Expect more posts on that topic in the weeks ahead, leading to the holiday season.

To end the week, we have a Q&A we did with a few of the team members from Socialcast., We sent the questions to Socialcast CEO Tim Young, the company's founder and chief executive officer. He worked on the questions with Matt Wilkinson, vice president of products and Monica Keller, the company's director of engineering.

Walled gardens are already under attack because of the ease of sending content like messages and photos from one website to another. Sites that don't let content flow in and out freely, when that's what users want, are fighting against the powerful tide of the internet.

Now a new proposal aims to take things to the next level and send a payload of item-type specific action options along with every piece of content that gets shot across the internet. A loose body of innovators from some of the biggest social networking companies online have begun discussing an addition to the Activity Streams standard format called an Action Stream.

Cliqset is a Florida-based technology startup that end-users have had a hard time understanding. The company just released a new product that developers should have no trouble with at all and that could send waves of innovation across the social web.

Called Cliqset FeedProxy, the service consumes user activity feeds from more than 70 online services like Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Last.fm, Yelp and LibraryThing and then produces an outbound feed that's compliant with the ActivityStreams standard format.

Social media aggregator Cliqset today announced a new beta version of its platform that aggregates activity feeds from 70 different social media sites, transforms them into normalized Activity Streams standard data and then pushes them out in real time.

The company's offers multiple ways to access the data through its API but also hopes that more users will stick with its own, now much improved, user interface. The first 200 ReadWriteWeb readers to click this link will gain access to the new beta version of the site.

MySpace will announce in the next few weeks a major new feature being added to its MySpaceID product that will allow third-party websites to write updates into the MySpace activity feed just like Facebook Connect, but will also incorporate open semantic microformat code in order to comprehend what those updates are about and make more sophisticated update highlighting and recommendation decisions.

It's a major move being worked on with both the Activity Streams and Open Social communities - it could push the rest of the web, outside of Facebook, in a direction that supports radical app innovation through the creation of a level playing field of readable data. And it could make MySpace a lot better, too.

The future of search almost certainly involves social networks, social graphs, or social filtering in some capacity. Companies will live or die by whether they get the "social" part right: creating the right level of intimacy, trust, reliability, social connectedness, and accuracy in their results listings. Of course, this specifically means that their user experience must at least meet or, preferably, exceed that of Google's.

To achieve this, we must first stop arguing over the different flavors of search.