Social Stream is a plugin for Ruby on Rails. It provides your application with social networking features and activity streams.

Social networks are a new paradigm on web application design. Social networking platforms stand among the most popular websites, while many content oriented applications are supporting social networking features in order to improve engagement, enhance user awareness and stimulate communities around the website.

Social Stream is based in Social Network Analysis concepts and methods, including social entities (actors), ties and relations. It also provides a new tie-based access control model.

Activity Streams is a format for syndicating social activities around the web. It has already been adopted by some of the major social networking platforms.

Social Stream provides a database schema based on the Activity Streams specification, leading your application towards a well-known compatible data model design.

It requires Rails 3. A gem for strength hierarchies in relations is required. Add to your Gemfile:

gem 'atd-ancestry', :require => 'ancestry'

and

bundle update

Then install the plugin with:

rails plugin install http://github.com/ging/social_stream.git

And run:

rails generate social_stream:install

This will generate the following:

* A migration providing the database schema
* An initializer configuration file for Social Stream.
* A database seeds file for defining Social Stream relations. You must add:
    SocialStream.seed!
  to your db/seeds.rb

Social Stream relies in other authentication solutions like Authlogic or Devise.

You must include an actor_id column in the user’s migration. Then add user to config/initializers/social_stream.rb

You must do the same with Activity Objects, like posts, comments or photos. Don’t forget to add a activity_object_id column in the migration and add them to the initializer.

Social Stream documentation is available at rdoc.info

It is at an early stage of development. Feel free to add an issue or send a message at github.