In the world of real-time content experiences, user engagement, community, and retention metrics reign supreme.
Fortunately, you can elevate your UX and improve KPIs that mean the most to your app with Stream's Activity Feed API and SDKs. Our reusable components are easy to integrate, require little to no maintenance, and, most importantly, can scale alongside your growing user base.
In this blog post, we will dive deep into the capabilities, value, best practices, and wide variety of Stream Feeds use cases. We will explore how the API can positively impact your app, whether it's a social media platform, content distribution network, or project management tool.
Understanding Stream's Activity Feed API
An activity feed is a real-time list of actions performed by users. They display information from a user's online community, such as posts, likes, follows, comments, and content shares.
With Stream, developers can build sophisticated, real-time feeds without managing complex infrastructure. You can combine multiple activity sources, such as following, popular, or interest-based content, and rank them per user to deliver personalized "For You" experiences. Stream also supports fan out, notifications, monetization opportunities, and flexible ranking and aggregation, giving you the tools to shape exactly how content surfaces in your app.
Beyond core feed delivery, Stream includes features like threaded comments, polls, bookmarking, stories, activity search and filtering, visibility controls, and fine-grained permissions.
When apps leverage Stream's API, they can drive higher user retention rates, session length, engagement, and satisfaction.
Common Activity Feed Use Cases
Beyond social media apps, activity feeds are leveraged in a variety of ways for education, telehealth, wellness, financial, team collaboration, virtual events, gaming, and dating platforms. These verticals can be bucketed into three primary categories:
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Social Platforms: Create dynamic and interactive social feeds where users can like, comment, engage with advertisements, and receive real-time notifications for a more engaging social experience. Follow-relationships created with feeds can help users build a greater sense of community within your app, like this gaming app for women.
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Content Sharing Apps: Store and display multimedia content that viewers can access and engage with. An educational Learning Management System (LMS), for example, allows admins to serve relevant content to students and send them reminders about upcoming assignments through activity feeds.
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Collaboration Tools: Facilitate seamless communication and project updates with real-time updates that enhance productivity and collaboration among team members. A great example of a project management platform leveraging feeds is Stream customer Filo.
The Value of Integrating Stream's Activity Feed API
Choosing to integrate a reusable component versus building activity feeds in-house significantly streamlines development and time spent on maintenance and iterations.
If you opt for a home-grown solution, be prepared to budget bandwidth and resources to engineer:
- "To Targeting" Features, like @Mentions and Tags
- Monitoring, Devops, Testing & Documentation
- URL Previews
- Reactions, Comments, and Nested Comments
- Notification Feeds and Aggregation Logic
- Ranking Algorithms
- Enrichment of Re-usable Data
- File and Image Uploads and CDN storage
- Fan Out Read & Write
- Batch Methods for Adding and Removing Content
- Batch Methods for Follows and Unfollows
- Custom UI
- Securing HIPAA & GDPR Compliance
- Hosting & Latency
- Costs & Scalability
- Real-Time Updates on Feeds & Reactions
Our API and SDKs accelerate the development and eliminate the responsibility of maintaining and improving upon all of those features and provide additional support from comprehensive documentation, world-class customer support, and a user-friendly UI Kit.
Stream's Feeds API also provides superior scalability. Stream's robust infrastructure is built on GO, RocksDB, and Raft to ensure an instant feed experience with low latency at scale. Stream can handle the demands of growing user bases and activity loads, all while managing fan out through push and pull mechanisms. Implementing such a system in-house would be both complex and cost-prohibitive.
Successful API Integration Case Studies
Survey data shows that after integrating the Stream Activity Feed API, Stream customers saw user engagement increase by an average of 66% and user retention increase by 58%. Learn more about the impressive gains real Stream customers have experienced with our API, as well as the challenges they faced before integration, how they leveraged our API to solve them, and the positive outcomes achieved.
Explore five examples of platforms that effectively utilize Stream's Feeds API below.
1. Dabble
Dabble is a sports wagering and daily fantasy app that centers social interaction, letting users view, copy, and comment on bets alongside real-time chat.
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Challenge: Dabble needed to build a social wagering experience that incorporated feeds, chat, and moderation, all while avoiding the complexity of building that infrastructure from scratch and ensuring high uptime in a competitive space.
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Strategy: Dabble integrated Stream Chat, Stream Activity Feeds, and Stream's moderation tools. They used Stream to power user feeds (so users could see and copy bets), group chat (Banter channels), comments, and rule-based moderation of content.
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Result: Since adopting Stream, Dabble has enjoyed reliable performance with minimal support effort. Social metrics, such as chat participation, copied bets, and comment activity, have increased, reinforcing Dabble's unique social wagering niche.
2. Ajaib
Ajaib is a leading FinTech platform in Southeast Asia, serving over one million users with stock, ETF, and mutual fund investing tools. Facing inflexibility and scalability limits with their prior provider, Ajaib transitioned to Stream's Chat and Activity Feeds to realign with their product goals.
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Challenge: Ajaib's existing chat provider (Sendbird) was rigid on pricing, imposed group size limits (20,000 users), and their in-house feed system demanded heavy maintenance while yielding low engagement.
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Strategy: They replaced both the proprietary chat and feed systems with Stream Chat and Stream Activity Feeds, migrating data and functionality while leveraging Stream's support.
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Result: Within months, Ajaib saw a 30% increase in user engagement and a 30% reduction in development effort, while gaining a scalable, reliable foundation for growth.
3. Relive
Relive turns outdoor adventures into immersive 3D video stories, helping users relive their journeys in motion. To power its community and discovery features at scale, Relive built on Stream's Activity Feeds API.
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Challenge: Relive needed a feed infrastructure that could evolve rapidly with their app, handle major traffic surges, and maintain data privacy while giving users personalized social experiences.
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Strategy: They integrated Stream's feed APIs within two weeks, keeping user data on their own cloud (for GDPR compliance) while letting Stream manage feed construction, performance, and scaling.
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Result: The team drastically reduced development risk and time, enabled reliable feed performance even during traffic spikes (e.g. after a Tim Cook mention), and saw more engaged users who stayed longer thanks to social features.
4. Healthline
Healthline is the largest website and provider of health information in the world. By utilizing the power of Stream Feeds, their Product Development team could focus on serving the unique needs of each community and save time, energy, and resources.
- Challenge: Healthline needed a better way to match new users with existing members based on the medical data collected during onboarding.
- Strategy: Stream Feeds helped Healthline discover that optimizing the experience for new members as quickly as possible translates into long-term engagement and retention.
- Result: By using Stream Feeds, Healthline was able to dramatically increase 90-day retention.
5. CodePen
Founded in 2012, CodePen is the go-to social community where over 300K front-end designers and developers gather to write, test, and share code. CodePen's online text editor makes it easy to build and test components in real time using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript --- but it's the social development aspect that sets CodePen apart from other dev platforms.
- Challenge: CodePen's original activity feed needed an overhaul to improve performance. The team recognized an opportunity to add new and expanded functionality to stay competitive in an evolving social media landscape.
- Strategy: After evaluating Stream Feeds, it became clear that the third-party component solution would provide more advanced functionality at a significantly lower cost than in-house development, with a straightforward integration process and enterprise-grade technical support.
- Result: CodePen's Following, Trending, and Activity feeds, all powered by Stream, work together to give users a seamless personalized content discovery experience that rivals today's leading social platforms.
Before You Integrate
To set yourself up for seamless integration, be sure to map out your required features and feed types, outline follow-relationships between feeds and users, and determine who can add content to the feed and where it will go.
Our Feeds API offers immense engineering convenience and removes the challenging obstacle of scalability. However, if you wish to further customize your activity feed, please consider that our pricing structure is based on usage and features, and custom implementations may incur additional expenses.
Conclusion
Stream's Activity Feeds API gives applications the ability to incorporate the ultimate engaging UX without derailing their existing development roadmap. As you assess your application needs, consider Stream Feeds as a powerful solution to implement activity feeds that will encourage users to return to your app and leave it feeling satisfied. Take your platform's potential to new heights with real-time content delivery from Stream's Feeds API.
Try the API for yourself, or contact our sales team to learn more.