Activity Streams are just an extension of Notifications from a technology point of view. But they offer a very different experience. They're provide a list of activities that have taken place, some of which could be a notification, but also new activities as they take place. Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and many other social and news sites and apps have adopted the idea of activity streams as core to their user experience.
So, in this section of the workshop we're going to expand on our knowledge of Pusher and use different events to identify types of activity and build an activity stream. This is a really nice mechanism; not only for identifying what's happening to the activity data, but also for splitting out our client-side application logic when handling incoming events.
However, to start off with we're going to build some very simple social authentication into our application. Doing so means we can have a user associated with each activity e.g. Olga liked the status update.
Let's get started adding our super simple social auth to our app.