Is the social stream the new email?
During the "Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet" panel today at SXSW (moderated by VentureBeat's own Eric Eldon) all the participants agreed that social streams of data are going to be an integral part of the web going forward. David Sacks, the chief executive of Yammer, went farther, calling these streams "email 2.0." No one seemed to disagree.
With Facebook's new redesign now fully in place and focusing on real-time updates in your feed, the concept of social activity streams is moving into the mainstream. And while Facebook previously helped bring the idea of the news feed itself to the mainstream, this next iteration which includes live updates, comments and "likes," was pioneered by others. But everyone on the panel today, which included representatives from FriendFeed, Microsoft, Yammer and Facebook, seemed to agree that the future of this space was making this data accessible no matter which service you are using.
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