Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Windows Phone People Hub Powered by Activity Streams

by Rob Dolin via Windows Live for Developers on 10/12/2010 3:24:00 AM

As you may have heard, Microsoft made a major announcement about Windows Phone 7 this morning. On the Inside Windows Live blog, my colleague Chris Jones wrote about some of the many places where Windows Phone integrates with Windows Live in this blog post.

Here on our Windows Live for Developers, I’m excited to let you know that the Windows Live activities on the “People Hub” of Windows Phone 7 are powered by Activity Streams. Yes, the same Atom Activity Extensions format that I wrote about in August are powering the “what’s new” view on the Windows Phone 7 “People Hub.”

Also, while the above screenshot shows only Windows Live and Facebook, if you connect other services to Windows Live like LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, WordPress, and ~70 more, you and your friends will also see these in the People Hub experience on Windows Phone 7.

For example of what a Windows Live Activity Streams feed looks like, browse to your Windows Live Profile at http://profile.live.com/ (or feel free to use mine) and then click the orange RSS/Atom button in your web browser to see a public version of that user’s activity stream. You’ll see a URL like:
http://api.live.net/Users(-5141839532282463176)/Activities?$format=atom10&mkt=en-US
and if you View | Source, you’ll see the Activity Streams feed, just like what is used by Win Phone 7:

If you’d like to learn more about Activity Streams, visit http://ActivityStrea.ms/, and if you’d like to join the Windows Phone 7 team in developing with the Windows Live Activity Streams API’s, check-out this blog post and http://dev.live.com/. Thanks very much--
--Rob