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. But that may very well change.

Finding social interactions and websites through activity streams make a lot of sense. Google Buzz is designed to fill that niche. According to Chris Messina, the businesses who will do the best in this new streamy environment will be the one's who figure out how social interactions apply to the value proposition they deliver to their customers.

ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here?

SHOW NOTES 02:08 -- Research conducted by Leysia Palen at the University of Colorado at Boulder about how people exchanged information via social media on the day of the Virginia Tech massacre, where people predicted with 100% accuracy the names of 21 of the 22 fatally shot students.

03:53 -- Within organizations, there is a need for information to flow more freely. But often there are peculiar, archetypal boundaries inside organizations that restrict those flows.

On the flip-side, in open source communities information flows much more transparently, making it easier for people to get their work done with fewer interruptions.

05:01 -- There is a distinction between newsfeeds and activity streams. It is important to realize that channels such as Facebook messages, twitter direct messages and SMS, while part of the fabric of the social web, are point to point communications, like email, so they are invisible to most of us. E-mail was specifically designed as a point-to-point communication channel. You can add other people, but there's no way to send messages to everybody. That's is the problem that the social Web solves. Rather than force a message into everyones inbox, social media makes it possible for information to be discoverable, either through search or through modeling activity streams. Â Social media reduces the loss of fidelity and the friction associated with replicating information within organizations.

06:57 -- What's been most interesting to Chris about working on Google Buzz is how the social networking service is being used within the enterprise to keep people on the same page. Unlike e-mail, which requires significant effort for newcomers to speed on what transpired before they were roped in, Google Buzz makes it easier to bring people into a conversation stream that's been going on for some time with a format that is more intuitive and chronological than an email grist.

07:52 -- Activity streams are a better method of representing conversations because unlike with search, where the information you are get is based on a keyword you come up with, activity streams give you the opportunity to experience information serendipitously. And activity streams also give us the ability to monitor popular behavior and make decisions based on trends. So the notions of discoverability and trend watching are made possible by the activity stream format.

In a B2B context, employees might use their activity stream to keep abreast of deadlines and stay on top of priorities by monitoring the actions of their colleagues.

09:06 -- Sourceforge, a website where open source developers collaborate to share and improve code, sets a good example of how organizations might use the social Web to improve their processes.

Github.com is a newer alternative to Sourceforge that revolves around an activity stream. "So you can go in and follow different people's activities. Watch a repository of projects. For example, if Audacity was on Github, I could go in and I could watch it.

If things were added to that repository, they would show up in my stream," says Chris Messina.

"Watching is a way of tuning in or listening to updates that happen in that context." On the flip-side, if you subscribe to the edit history of Wikipedia page you can keep abreast of the changes, but there's no way to participate in an RSS feed.

10:35 -- In a B2B context, organizations could use activity streams to improve workflows. For example, if you were working on a project with others, project dependencies and milestones could trigger status updates to inform you that the project is ready for your contribution.

You might have software agents looking for certain types of activities or patterns that trigger responses or alerts and make workflow processes more efficient. Or even on a much more basic level, if someone is out sick, rather than send an e-mail to their manager, they could post a status update to the company's activity feed and notify the enterprise instead of the old chain of command, the archetypal model, which is not necessarily the most efficient.

11:10 -- "The Starfish and The Spider" by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckman, which compares top-down, militaristic organizational hierarchies which define the industrial age to decentralized systems, which have the capacity to reproduce and self heal.

The metaphor is that if you crush the head of a spider, its legs are useless. But if you cut off the leg of a starfish, it will regenerate into a new starfish.

"So from an organizational perspective, if you can design your team's to be regenerative in that way, then your organization, as things change -- as people move jobs, as they quit -- will be able to respond much more quickly, and that much less cost," says Chris.

"What that requires is for you to punish much more responsibility and control down to the edges of the network as opposed to centralizing power at the top. And that's how you wind up with the much faster moving organization."

13:05 -- "For example, at Facebook -- and I know this because I have friends there -- everyone has access to live running code. They all build stuff off of the live database. There is no secondary, replicated database that they work off, because there's so much data, it just wouldn't make sense. It would take two weeks just copy it.

So instead, they build apps, and they have certain ways of testing it so it's not going to break stuff, but they are working with live data. That means that every single engineer and developer has equal access and can build really compelling, interesting things and can then push it back up the stack to become part of the Facebook product within a week. And, in fact, they do weekly pushes. And what that means is that, let's say last week I worked on a new feature that does something fairly simple. I don't have to wait six months to see that feature go into production,