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Feed aggregators

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Sony PSP system update includes Flash, AAC support

Sony updated its system software for the PlayStation Portable last night. System update 2.7 includes support for Flash content inside the browser, AAC audio playback, and channel-level RSS settings. AAC support means the PSP might soon support QuickTime chapters, allowing podcasters to add images and descriptive text to individual segments. Flash 6 limits the functionality of new multimedia features such as streaming audio and video but it should work fine within websites using Flash for navigation. Tags: pspsonypsp…

Google GData

Google’s GData format is a” new protocol based on Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0.” It also includes OpenSearch elements. It’s too late in the day for me to dig into the format right now, but you might enjoy having a look….

FeedBurner adds e-mail subscriptions

FeedBurner just announced FeedBurner Email, allowing readers to subscribe to your feed via e-mail. Most Internet users are familiar with e-mail but a feed reader is a completely foreign concept. They live within Outlook and have an efficient work flow governed by rules-based sorting and alerts. This new feature provided by FeedBurner helps a feed publisher reach more readers in their favorite method of delivery. E-mail subscriptions to a feed is nothing new, even for FeedBurner customers. The company has partnered with FeedBlitz and more recently Squeet to provide e-mail subscriptions in the past, and both companies remain an option…

Google Toolbar adds feed subscriptions

The latest version of Google’s Firefox toolbar adds support for feed subscriptions to online aggregators with just one click. Users are able to choose from a list of five popular online aggregators as well as Firefox’s own Live Bookmarks option. The icon was located right below the address bar feed icon in my Firefox window and seems like the least confusing place for the button even though it’s odd to see two options. I was able to choose between Bloglines, Google Personalized homepage, My Yahoo!, NewsGator Online, and Pluck. It would be nice to provide advanced users with the…

FeedDemon 2.0 raises the bar

Congratulations to Nick Bradbury on the release of FeedDemon 2.0. Nick calls FeedDemon 2.0 “the best work I’ve ever done” and as someone who has been following the product since its first beta I have to agree. The new version of FeedDemon tracks the feeds you pay the most and least attention to over time, helping you realize who might be most worthy of your 5 minutes of reading time. Stylesheets have received a total overhaul. You can select a default feed reading stylesheet for the entire app as well as custom stylesheets on a per-feed including a photo-specific view…

Google Reader adds sharing

Google Reader users can now share tagged feed items with anyone on the web via Gmail, an Atom feed, JSON, or a view within Google Reader. All you have to do is authorize one or more tags as shared and publish the appropriate URL or JavaScript. The new feature was announced tonight on the Google Reader blog. You can utilize special tags to enable new feature for yourself or your site. Adding a tag of “blogsidebar” to an item for example could add that item to a link list in your blog’s sidebar. A tag of “mom” would queue up…

FeedBurner expands to San Francisco, moves in with Adaptive Path

FeedBurner just announced the hiring of Don Loeb and its expansion to a San Francisco office. Don also posted an announcement on his blog. Don was previously led business at Yahoo!’s personalized media division including My Yahoo!, Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Groups, etc. FeedBurner’s San Francisco office is most likely a rented desk at Adaptive Path, a San Francisco user experience design firm. Adaptive Path rents desks on the second floor of its building to small companies for about $250 a month. Tags: feedburner…

NewsGator API

The NewsGator API allows synchronization of feed and item-level data across multiple locations. NewsGator has a few unique features not available in other APIs such as Google Reader, so I will dive right into the unique features. SOAP now, REST later The NewsGator API is currently offered as a SOAP interface only but Brent Simmons mentioned future plans for REST support during his presentation at last week’s Emerging Technology conference. Authentication An application acts on behalf of a user with a NewsGator account. The account also allows access to NewsGator Online, a web-based aggregator that can be used anywhere. Locations…

Google Reader platform

Google built a feed platform that is freely available for any user with a Google account. The first implementation of the Google feed platform is the Google Reader lens, already used by thousands of Google users. The Google feed platform is web-based and therefore works with any operating system. It can be used as a pass-through for one feed at a time for small implementations or a full aggregator backend. It’s running on the Google’s expansive (and expensive) back-end hardware and network, creating fast response times and high reliability. Atom 1.0 output The Google Reader platform outputs all data in…

Windows RSS platform

The Windows RSS platform is included in Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista, both due out later this year. The platform exposes feed and list data to all Windows applications via a common API, manages enclosure downloads, and applies common security settings to feed data and downloads. Common Feed List Windows XP and Windows Vista users will soon be using Internet Explorer 7 as their default browser. They may notice a glowing orange button on their toolbar, click it, and start subscribing to feeds exposed on the page. A subscribed feed is added to the Common Feed List, a centralized…

Feeds as a platform

Feed aggregator developers currently struggle with multiple data formats, unclean sources, HTTP status handling, and many other complex problems that take time away from actually developing their application. New feed platforms are emerging that will allow developers to leverage the existing work of larger teams that already sweat the small stuff every day, allowing new aggregator developers to focus on creating new experiences on top of feed data to thrill users and deliver requested features quicker and easier than ever before. Microsoft, Google, and NewsGator are three examples of established companies exposing their feed architecture to the outside world to…

State of the aggregator

In the beginning, there was text. Early feed applications such as Netscape’s In-Box Direct, PointCast, and Microsoft Active Desktop transformed existing data formats such as a newspaper and its articles, summaries, and full-text and applied traditional publishing thoughts to a new transport medium. Almost 10 years after then introduction of early web feed formats we are just starting to tap into the full potential of feeds as a descriptive data format with rich payloads and more easily discoverable content. Desktop aggregation The desktop has been the traditional home of feed experiences. Our desktop aggregators are full of text-heavy content (preferably…

Feed platform presentation: Microsoft, Google, and NewsGator

As previously mentioned, I will lead a session on Feeds as a Platform at the Emerging Technology conference tomorrow at 1:45 p.m. I will talk about the feed ecosystem, peer into the future a bit, and introduce attendees to three real-world examples of feed platforms. Windows RSS platform. Jane Kim of Microsoft will present Microsoft’s new technologies exposing feeds at the operating system level. You will see feed handling in action on the latest builds of Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7 and learn why they matter to both users and developers. Google Reader API. I will introduce the Google…

Feeds as a platform talk at ETech

I will be at O’Reilly’s sold-out Emerging Technology conference next week learning about the latest developments in the online technology world and talking to a lot of smart people. If you are at the conference you should come to my Feeds as a Platform presentation on Wednesday, March 8, at 1:45 p.m. I will talk about new trends in the syndication space and the technologies that make it all possible. What will the syndication space look like at the end of 2006? What are the underutilized applications of the technology primed for the most growth? What new products and services…

Continued interests

I’ve been digging into a few new areas of interest over the past few months I feel still need improvement in search, discovery and tracking. I’ve spoken about most of these topics in my podcast series with Om, but it’s worth mentioning again in text. I’m interested in continuing my work in these areas and perhaps helping to solve some existing problems. Feeds We have RSS 2.0, and Atom 1.0, the world is starting to understand how syndicated content makes sense, but I don’t see a lot of future thinking for handling multiple locations, personas, and personalized content. Advertising is…

Story of Google Reader

I had lunch today with the Google Reader team and learned a bit more about the group, their success and challenges, and how new projects at Google are sometimes formed. This is the story of how a side-project intended for someone’s blog became a feed aggregator integrated into one of the largest Web properties in the world. It all started with a love of blogging. Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell were both members of the Blogger team and working on different ways to trick out their personal blogs. Jason kept various blogs including a link blog and wanted a way…

Feed exclusion using categories

Many current and future feed publishers create content targeted at individuals for personal use and are not meant for widespread consumption. You may have a customized feed from Netflix, FeedBurner, or WordPress.com to track your movie queue, subscriber count, or blog stats respectively. Some feeds offer privacy through obfuscated URLs and others are just a one-time token exchange at the time of subscription. Given the current merged back-ends of online search aggregators with search and other methods of open discovery, how can a feed publisher opt-out of a public index? One solution using existing element sets may be to overload…

Google Toolbar API

Google Toolbar version 4 allows developers to create custom buttons using a custom XML descriptor and extended functionality using RDF, RSS, and Atom feeds. The Google toolbar button API can be used to display the latest entry titles from a feed, execute a keyword or URL search, or continuously communicate data at a glance. I created custom buttons for this blog and Technorati. The Google Toolbar can now serve as a feed reader for any feed with a custom Google Toolbar icon. You can even specify in your button file a different icon you would like to display when new…

Exclusive: Google to offer feed API

Google plans to offer a feed reader API to allow third-party developers to build new views of feed data on top of Google’s backend. The new APIs will include synchronization, feed-level and item-level tagging, per-item read and unread status, as well as rich media enclosure and metadata handling. Google Reader PM Jason Shellen and engineer Chris Wetherell both confirmed Google’s plans after I posted my reverse-engineering analysis of the Google Reader backend. The new APIs will allow aggregator developers to build new views and interactions on top of Google’s data. Google currently has at least two additional Google Reader views…

Google Reader API

Documentation of the unreleased Google Reader API for feed syndication proxies and account access.

Bloglines 3.0

Bloglines switched it’s user-agent from “Bloglines 2.1” to “Bloglines 3.0-rho” on Tuesday afternoon. My guess is that “rho” are the initials of a Bloglines search engineer who pushed his test code live without changing the user-agent but there could be some big changes coming in near future. If you are a FeedBurner user you may have noticed a large drop in your subscriber statistics over the past day (hat tip: jasonspage). I just heard back from Dick Costolo, CEO, and learned that FeedBurner had previously ignored this Bloglines user-agent as it was just a development test but they will…

My Yahoo! feed API

Yahoo! has developed a backend infrastructure that can be easily deployed across various applications online or on the desktop with full synchronization and feed parsing handled on its servers. Developers could tap into the Yahoo! backend and develop new feed-aware applications quickly and easily on a robust platform already used by millions of users. Yahoo! just needs to publicize the code and make sessions a bit easier but I reverse engineered their code and I’ll give you a primer. Aggregator developers spend a lot of time dealing with issues such as proper parsing, feed storage, and at later stages…

Answering Scott Gatz

Scott Gatz of Yahoo! poses a few questions on his blog that came up during a private dinner Monday night. I think some of the questions already have answers so I’ll post them here. It’s a bit feed geeky and may have an intended audience of about 20 people. No index flag. We need a way to mark an RSS feed as “OK to aggregate, but don’t show in search results.” For publishers who output a different feed per user, you don’t want to see 100 different feeds that are basically the same thing. I think the robots meta tag…

FeedBurner adds 7 pieces of flair

FeedBurner introduced FeedFlare this morning, a new way to easily add information to the bottom of your post content. FeedBurner creates small GIF files — about 300 bytes each — for each feature allowing supplementary information about the post to be updated without changing an item’s read status in an aggregator. FeedFlare launched with the following 7 features: E-mail a link to this post to a friend or colleague. E-mail the author of the post. This feature only works if you have already have defined the author’s e-mail address somewhere in the feed such as managingEditor element in RSS or…

Rich RSS beyond text

I just posted the latest episode of Om and Niall PodSesssions to our podcast site. This week Om and I talk about the possibilities of RSS beyond text and blogs as content such as photos, music, movies, and more are delivered using RSS and other syndication formats. I have been playing around with some of the new broadband RSS services on my TiVo and thinking about new methods of content delivery to the home. Broadband access has been sold as an instant-on service available anytime you wish to interact and retrieve information. I believe the next wave of services will…

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