Syndication and Widgets Primer

Today’s publishers need to think beyond the fixed location of their website and fully integrate with the large hubs of user activity on the desktop, mobile phone, social networks, blogs, and web pages at large. Syndication and widgets power new opportunities to carry content beyond the walls of a single site and into some of the largest brands in the world yet some publishers still haven’t gotten the message. I recorded a 1-hour video presentation earlier this week to better explain the syndication and widget landscape to web publishers.

Apple My iTunes widgets

Apple is syndicating iTunes purchase history and user reviews as Flash widgets and Atom feeds under a new program called My iTunes Widgets. Any iTunes Music Store customer can opt-in to sharing their subscribed podcasts, purchased music, music video, TV shows, movies, and positive reviews through an account preference set in the iTunes application.

Google Feed API

Google Reader finally has its first official API. Any developer in the world can request the entire history of a web feed from Google’s geo-distributed server cloud in a normalized response for inclusion in their websites or products. I’ve been hoping for such an API since I first deconstructed the Google Reader backend in December 2005. Most users will likely interact with the Google AJAX Feed API through a JavaScript library included on their site or a pre-configured badge generated on the Google site. The Feed API wrapper is part of a larger effort by Google to extend its search…

Two feed syndication talks at Web 2.0 Expo

The Web 2.0 Expo officially kicked off yesterday at the Moscone conference center in San Francisco, bringing together thousands of web technologists to learn new things and market new web products. I participated in conference planning as a program chair, selecting a range of topics to educate technical product managers on the latest web technology, specifically in the Web 2.0 Fundamentals track. I’m leading two sessions at the conference on feed syndication technologies and I’ll be in attendance all three days if you’d like to say hello. Intermediate to Advanced Syndication Web frameworks and software packages now feature basic…

Nokia releases H.264 video podcatcher

Nokia announced a new mobile feed reader focused on video today at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona. The Nokia Video Center comes pre-installed on new Nokia Series 60 devices such as the newly announced N95 and N93i but is also available as a separate download for compatible devices. You can load videos onto the phone through your home computer or receive updates over-the-air at HSDPA speeds or using open WiFi while you’re on the go. The Video Center software supports H.264 videos, meaning videobloggers have even more reasons to create specially formatted and mini-sized (320×240) versions of their show…

Yahoo! Pipes remixes the syndicated web

Yahoo! released Yahoo! Pipes tonight, a visual editing interface for web feed manipulation and reconstruction. The 5-person Pipes team, part of the Yahoo! TechDev incubation group, spent about 5 months developing the product to help people better remix the syndicated content they find online. Yahoo! Pipes lets any Yahoo! registered user enter a set of data inputs and filter their results. You might splice a feed of your latest bookmarks on del.icio.us with the latest posts from your blog and your latest photographs posted to Flickr. You might automatically translate your favorite news sources to your native language, or only…

Sony adds RSS to televisions

Sony’s latest HDTVs will support an optional component capable of streaming Internet video and downloading content defined using RSS syndication. The BRAVIA Internet Video Link is a small optional module attached to the back of your HDTV and connected to your home broadband network over Ethernet. Price and availability are still unannounced, but the first televisions supporting the new module will be available this Spring. The BRAVIA Internet Video Link operates independently without the need for a separate gateway computer on your network. It uses the Xross Media Bar (XMB) interface already present on a PSP to browse feed…

Apple Dashcode developer preview available for download

Apple released a developer beta version of Dashcode, a widget development environment included in its upcoming Leopard operating system. The preview software is available for Tiger until July. (via Brent Simmons) Dashcode lets anyone design a new widget through a drag and drop interface or by directly editing the underlying code. Bundled widget templates include a countdown timer, latest items from a web feed, web feed single item view, podcast, photocast, and an activity monitor. Dashcode will debug your Dashboard widget code placing all of your files within the appropriate package and generates additional nice touches such as a…

Delivering enclosures to IE7 and Windows

The feed syndication platform built-in to Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista may fail to download media enclosures larger than 15 MB. It’s a feature, not a bug, designed to prevent over consumption of computer bandwidth. The automatic download engine built-in to Windows (BITS) tries to queue up audio, video, or other enclosure content in a user’s subscription updates. It tries to be polite and not consume all available bandwidth, throttling back its consumption while higher priority tasks such as e-mail and web browsing receive new data. The download engine prefers to download large files in pieces, requesting an achievable…