Flow and Streams
Josh Porter writes about the Stream term that’s spreading in the Web:
You’ve probably heard the term “stream” in relation to attention, as in “attention stream”.The usage of the word is spreading, however, and is now finding its way into web application vernacular. It is called a “lifestream”, “socialstream”, “friendstream”, “contentstream”, among others.
It has come to mean a list of the always-updated items in a system.
[…]
Satisfaction’s Lane Becker suggests (and I think he’s right), that streams are as core to today’s social applications as the checkout sequence was to apps 5 years ago. He says:
The “stream” — let’s call it that, because “river” just doesn’t cut it — is, like tagging, one of those canonical, web-native inventions that is already so totally fundamental to inhabiting an online social system that its adoption is inevitable in every app that plans to aggregate people in a collaborative networked setting. The stream is to this round of the web what shopping carts were to the last one. It’ll show up everywhere, but put to very different ends in different places.
This is what I have been characterizing as ‘traffic and flow’ for some time:
- Flow is the term I use for the social channels used to move information from person to person in flow applications, like Twitter, Facebook, and dozens of others. The critical means to decide if something is a flow app is to see if important traffic can be flowed to you instead of you having to go and find it.
- Traffic is the information moving through the flow, such as status updates, but it could be (and in the future it increasingly will be) all sorts of stuff.
