Category Archives: Feed aggregators

eStarling WiFi picture frame

eStarling just released a picture frame with built-in WiFi that can receive photographs from any RSS feed or POP e-mail account. You configure the device once using a USB connection and it will automatically update itself over a 802.11b wireless network (even with WEP encryption). Pictures formatted in JPEG or bitmap format are displayed on a 5.6″ LCD. You could subscribe to a specific tag on Flickr or send e-mails from your cell phone to a special e-mail address such as a free Gmail account. I would love to give one of these to my mom and have it…

Atom-formatted resume and podcast

Last weekend I decided to break free of the standard boring job résumé or CV and express my job history in the Atom syndication format complete with audio enclosures. Syndication geeks may appreciate the implementation details. I used the published and updated dates to represent my start and end dates. My first day on the job seems like a good match for the published element’s intended use as the “time of the initial creation or first availability” and my last day on the job is the last time the entry was “modified in a significant way” or updated. Since…

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…

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…

Syndicate Conference San Francisco

I am a panelist for Searching the Syndisphere at next week’s Syndicate conference in San Francisco. The panel will discuss different approaches to indexing and surfacing syndicated content, business models, emerging trends, and other topics chosen by the moderator. If you would like to attend the two day conference you can save 30% using a discount priority code of SPKDEC. A two day pass is $836.50 and a one day pass is $437.50 with the discount code applied. Tags: atom, rss, syndicatesf, syndication…