At I Feel London, I Feel NYC, and IFeelToronto, you can find activities, nightlife, shops, dining, bars, and more based on how you feel: energetic, chilled, manly, sophisticated, romantic, naughty, manly, and even broke. After clicking on your current feeling, the different types of activities appear on the Google map with customized pushpins that match the feeling. For example, "girly" pushpins are a set of smoochy lips, "hungover" pushpins are really dark shades.

The maps are hardly comprehensive guides to the cities, but that's OK since they're open for collaboration. You can help fill in their gaps by requesting an invite to the various Google maps being created. Although only three maps are live now, there are nine maps in total being worked on at this time.

You might think the maps are just someone's nifty side project, but to Andy, they represent much more than that. He notes, "Although it's tempting to focus on how technology can enable new behavior, I'm more interested in how it can remove barriers to behaving in ways we are programmed to do. Mood - or state of mind - seems to me to be the most fundamental trigger for human action."

Further embracing open standards, actions are published via the plugin using the Atom format and the Microformat hAtom, which Six Apart hopes will make it easier for people to move their activity streams around and use them however they like.

On some level, this development at Six Apart somewhat mirrors the direction that chief rival Automattic is taking with Wordpress: microblogging. A couple of days ago, Automattic introduced a new theme for Wordpress.com called Prologue, which adds Twitter-like functionality to Wordpress. Six Apart's plugin, meanwhile, basically allows users to create a tumblelog of content aggregated from the places they already post it (thoughts from Twitter, images from Flickr, etc.). Activity Streams and Tumblr are not perfectly analogous, the same way Prologue and Twitter are not, but they do all fit in the same category of tools.

To me these announcements points to a couple of key trends:

• A trend toward microblogging -- always on updates distilled to their most base form are becoming a more visible and important part of blogging.
• A trend toward open formats and data portability -- take your data with you and display it however and wherever you want.

So how long until Wordpress follows Six Apart's lead with Activity Streams? My guess is that the always strong Wordpress developer community won't take very long at all to kick something unofficial out. In fact, my friend Dan Grossman has been using a plugin he developed for his own Wordpress-powered blog to do more or less the same thing for months now (see it in action here). He hasn't released the source yet because others haven't expressed much interest to him. Perhaps that's about to change.

As more sites join DataPortability.org and we begin to hopefully see the fruits of their labor, things like distributed activity streams should become easier and more common.

Mark Zuckerberg's decision to make a wall street style news feed the central feature of the home page and the profile page at Facebook has been a huge reason for its recent success (and might also be the source of its growing pains)... And its been imitated all over the place these days.

Here at Read/WriteWeb, Marshall's year in review post on RSS included:

Facebook Introduced Millions of People to Syndication - No single event probably came close to the impact of Facebook's explosion in popularity in terms of popularizing the concept of syndication and feeds..."

In this post, I'll highlight why I find this so significant.

Significant Feeds in Marketplace

Facebook did lead the social networks with their News Feed. Initially, this was met by some resistance from the community (see these three Facebook Blog posts). However, eventually Facebook users did seem to calm down about this and the News Feed became one of the site's most oft-copied features. Followers include:

• Google Open Social Attention Streams (already included in Plaxo Pulse)
• MySpace Friends Updates
• Netvibes Activities (part of Ginger Release - see video below)


• LinkedIn Network Updates

Why is this significant?

In the introduction, I stated how bullish I was on the trend toward more and more applications using this feed style around users' activity. I'd like to highlight three of the reasons I believe this is such a good trend:

1. Improves Efficiency Using the Social Network
2. Increases Engagement with Site
3. Increases Awareness of Attention Silos

Improves Efficiency Using the Social Network

If you've used RSS to read content, you're certainly aware how efficient it can make you when consuming a lot of information. The paradigm lends itself to scanning a lot of information quickly and focusing on the most important content. I believe these feeds actually allow social network users to see the same benefit.

Increases Engagement with Site

Research has shown RSS are more engaged then other website visitors. It certainly would be interesting to repeat the research with feeds from social sites, but intuitively I believe these feeds have also increased engagement with these social networks. This theory is also validated by the importance thought leaders are placing on news feed optimization, such as Justin Smith and Dave McClure.

Increases Awareness of Attention Silos

The attention economy has been a big issue on the web for some time, but currently the data is still locked up in attention silos. (See an overview here by Alex Iskold.) Interestingly, the feeds these applications create do a great job educating users on the information being stored about them. All you have to do is look at the initial reaction the Facebook community had to the news feed introduction. It will be interesting to see if users ask to take their personal mini-feeds (attention) with them.

Conclusion

There certainly are features I'd like to see each of these feeds adopt. However, I believe the paradigm is a good one and the trend toward more social networks applying it is positive. Let me know if the comments below if you are equally optimistic.