Activity Feed Service Merging Cross-Device Streams
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current computing devices lack the ability to effectively track and resume user activities across multiple devices and platforms, leading to fragmented user experiences and reduced productivity, as they fail to capture comprehensive usage information and maintain continuity of tasks across different devices.
Innovation Solution
An activity feed service that collects and merges user engagement data from various devices, creating a unified activity stream that includes signals from applications and network-accessible services, allowing for the resumption of activities and providing a comprehensive view of user interactions across devices and platforms.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If computing devices track user activities across multiple devices and platforms, then user experience and productivity are improved, but device complexity and data management requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an activity feed service as an intermediary component that collects, processes, and stores user activity data from multiple devices and applications. This service acts as a mediator between various computing devices and the user, consolidating activity tracking functionality centrally rather than requiring each device to independently track and synchronize activities, thereby improving productivity while managing system complexity through centralized data handling
2Reliability
If computing devices track comprehensive user activities, then activity resumption capability is enhanced, but information storage and processing requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts and stores only the essential activity information needed for resumption purposes into an activity feed data structure. Rather than storing complete activity contexts or all possible user interactions, the system selectively captures key activity events (such as application launches, document openings, media playback) and stores them in a structured format that enables efficient retrieval and resumption while minimizing data storage requirements
3Ease of operation
If manual steps are required to resume interrupted activities, then ease of operation decreases, but automation complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements preliminary action by automatically capturing and storing activity information as users perform tasks, without requiring manual input or configuration. The activity feed service continuously monitors and records user activities in the background, preparing the data structure in advance so that when users want to resume activities, the system can immediately present available options based on previously captured data, eliminating the need for manual steps while keeping the user interface simple
Data Source
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AI summary
Technology related to an activity feed service is disclosed. In one example of the disclosed technology, a method can include receiving updates to activity streams, where a respective activity stream indicates an engagement of a respective user with applications executing on a respective client device connected to a network. The different activity streams associated with a particular user can be merged to generate a merged activity stream associated with the particular user. The different received activity streams can correspond to different respective client devices. The merged activity stream associated with the particular user can be transmitted over the network.