webactions-verbs-brainstorming

This page is for brainstorming about webactions verbs.

Common Clusters
Common clusters of web actions:


 *   - more specific than "share", more general than "comment", or "tweet"/"reply", though those might show up in a UI where a reader expected a Twitter-like experience
 *   - specifically to reply to the current URL. Twitter uses a different icon. IndieNews and Barnaby.co.uk both have reply actions.
 *   - generalization or Twitter's "retweet", Tumblr's "reblog" ("retumbl?"), Pinterest "repin"
 *   - generalization of Twitter "favorite", Facebook "like", GooglePlus "+1". Alternatively, could split this up into separate verbs for "favorite" and "like", or further specialize: "heart" (Instagram "like"), "star" (Flickr "favorite" and Twitter "favorite"). It's not clear which approach (general or specific) is better. People do assign different meanings to favoriting vs. liking. (there's a photo on flic.kr/tantek with a conversation about this but can't find it now)

New Verbs

 *   - for Flattr, Gittip buttons and maybe other payment providers.
 *   - for following someone's site
 * Note silo fallback URL for Twitter: https://twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_name=t

Other Sources

 * The Activitystreams verb registry might be a good place to start/mine research from --Waterpigs.co.uk 00:49, 24 February 2013 (PST)
 * The overlaps in verbs are misleading, and I (Tantek) tend to think ActivityStreams is a bad starting point for web actions verbs for several reasons:
 * Activities are a much broader set of things that you've *done*. Things that you might do to a piece of content on one site across onto another site are a much smaller subset. Starting from "Activities" will likely be a dilutionary distraction.
 * There is very little clearly supportive research documentation for the verbs/object-types in the ActivityStreams registries (how did they come up with them? based on what features on what real world sites?). They tried to follow a microformats-like process but failed to document their work, so it looks like people just made things up (whether or not they did).
 * Most of the ActivityStreams objects types and verbs were proposed by people who never actually implemented them (dogfood fail), nevermind that they didn't implement them on their own sites (selfdogfood fail). Note the lack of anything more than minimal "examples in the wild" documentation on wiki.activitystrea.ms.
 * Similar and more issues are documented on the ActivityStreams page.
 * A much better place to start/mine research from would be to document the real world web actions that individual silos support (e.g. Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest, Twitter) that other sites actually place on their content, or even better, that indieweb sites use on their content and generalize from there. Tantek 08:09, 24 February 2013 (PST)
 * Researched and now documented here: webactions-verbs-research