Activity streams and data visualizations let us consume vast amounts of data in short periods of time.

Together, they may just be the magic bullet for business to realize the true value of the social web.

The problem, there are no interoperable standards for activity streaming and most companies hoard their data, says Google Open Web Advocate Chris Messina (@chrismessina) in this exclusive interview about how activity streams and infographics will revolutionize the way organizations conduct business, and how employees and project teams prioritize and manage work flows.

Today, we think of a Facebook news feed as an activity stream. But we've only just scratched the surface of how activity streams integrated into work flow processes will fundamentally change the way we collaborate.

Using Google Buzz, the open source community and Facebook's product development process as examples, Chris makes it easy to understand how and why activity streams are central to online collaboration, how they sharpen an organization's competitive edge and how they will ultimately result in better products and services.

Given the sheer volume of data that's out there now, information parsed in smaller, bite-size chunks is more valuable than gigs and gigs, because it's easier to digest in a shorter period of time.

Like status updates, activity streams make data easier to appreciate. Â We have learned to attenuate ourselves to dropping in and pulling out of streams to prolonged state of "ambient intimacy."

Google Buzz is the search giant's first attempt at an activity streaming service, which is being used by project teams to collaborate on business projects. Social graphs are a byproduct of activity streams.

The are the collection of messages, relationships and interactions that occur in activity streams, and if you create infographics to better understand that data, the you can glean meaningful business intelligence from all the data. But currently, most organizations are not making their data available.

They're hoarding their it, depriving employees and customers from using it to better understand how they can improve their business processes.

This is a missed opportunity because data affords company's retrospective insight, intelligence about the nature of the way its employee's collaborate, and the ability to maintain a faster, more responsive, healthier organization. If organizations do get over the hoarding hurdle, they're still going to need to find a way to make their data useful, and that's where data visualization comes in.

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and realizing actionable business intelligence from raw data is significantly enhanced through infographics that make it easy to understand the meaning of the data.

Yet even Facebook, with all the data it has about its users, gives users very little in the way of insights to help us better manage our attention online. Â They hoard data as well.

Facebook could provide so much valuable intelligence about what motivates us online, but currently, they even struggle to present us with ads that are relevant to our interests. In all fairness, the same is true of Google.

In fact, as popular as Google Analytics is, it really tells us very little about human behavior because it doesn't allow us to correlate social signifiers against how people spending time on our websites.

Numerical statistics don't give us any social intelligence about what people think about our sites.

Search engines are still the dominant channel through which we find information online.