I liked Webjillion’s Will Your New, Favorite Web Application Last?, straight to the point.
Web services is all about building value on top of services you do not (usually) own or control. Does this make sense? Is there a (development/business) model that could make such services more viable?
It looks like more and more people are ready to pay for services provided through the Internet -something a couple of years ago sounded like a blasphemy.
I have been quite enthusiastic about FeedBurner since the very first time I used it. I even did some coding using the various feedburner APIs and tried to integrate it with my appcliactions.
Then it struck me: we are in the rip-mix-burn era, rip-mix-burn should apply to feeds too.
We’ve got FeedBurner, that’s quite good for the BURN part. Search engines like Yahoo!, Google Blogsearch, Icerocket, Technorati, del.icio.us and others provide us with many options to RIP information into RSS or ATOM.
What we don’t yet have is a good MIX service. I would like to be able to mix two or more feeds regardless of the format they use (RSS, ATOM and variations) and get a single feed in the format I want. It would be nice to have additional options like “insert feed name befor title”, or “include this feed as a once-a-day/week summary” (FeedBurner does this for del.icio.us feeds but it could make sense for Flickr “photo streams” and probably other services too), etc.
Anyone working on something like this?
I’ve been messing around with the FeedBurner Management API. It will let you list, create, modify and delete your “burned” feeds. It’s nice and simple and I have a couple of cool things in mind that would take advantage of it’s features.
However I did not find any PHP implementation, that’s why I wrote my own. 
Feel free to use and modify the code.
Upcoming.org Team Joins Yahoo. Considering the rummors about Google Calendar (Google Calendar URL Is Live) this could be indicating that “web based calendar” could be the next major web app….
“Mapping news” everywhere!
- Google releasing Google Earth and Google Maps API
- Yahoo! Maps API is released.
- …and so does A9 Maps…
Wow! RSS feeds and APIs everywhere! Suddenly, in just a month or so, us developers have so many new tools!
Niall Kennedy notes that del.icio.us del.icio.us now allows users to browse tags by media types.
I guess this makes sense now that podcasting is so hot. It looks like a lot of people distribute “rich media” using RSS.
Nice.
David L. Sifry mentioned this very interesting article at the Technorati Developers mailin list.
Worth reading!
OK, I asked for it (probably others too!) and it’s done! Blogpulse allows you to get the results of any query as an RSS feed! This is sooooo cool!
This feature is much like Technorati’s watchlists, however you do not have to go through the watchlist creation proccess. Just pass the URL (or keywords) you are interested in as a parameter, and grab the results. I guess this can be used as an alternative “referrer list” for blog posts.
Well done!
Here is my problem. I set up monitor.vrypan.net using lilina. It is actually an aggregation of many Greek blogs. What I want to do is to provide a “common place” for greek blogs to interact with each other. So this is not “just a blogroll”, it is (or should be) something more.
This was a good oportunity to experiment with an idea I had for some time. I used the Technorati API to check how many blogs link to each post, in order to “illustrate” the “virtual conversations” between blogs.
I then came up with an unexpected problem. Some blogs use Feedburner (an excelent service btw) to export their feed. This is a good idea, since Feedburner provides nice features and reduces the traffic caused by feed readers and aggregators. One of the coolest features of feedburner is tracking of clicks: Feedburner will not expose the original post URL but a custom one that redirects to the original. When a user clicks on it Feedburner will track the click and redirect to the original URL. So, using the technorati API on “fake” Feedburner URLs is useless as they are not “real” blog URLs.
I think that there should be some other way to do this. A possible solution:
1) Feedburner includes the original URL’s MD5. (i.e. instead of http://feeds.feedburner.com/Vrypannetweblog?m=34 it will show http://feeds.feedburner.com/Vrypannetweblog?m=34&md5=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
2) Technorati will allow the use of MD5 instead of URL.
Is this possible? Do you think of some other to get arround this problem? (Sidenote: MD5(URL) can also be used by del.icio.us)
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Nice!