Neptune’s Lab

As I research the API and RSS Feed capabilities of various Web 2.0 services I will be continuously updating this matrix. Check this article often for updates.

				API	Feeds
Social Network
	(www)(wiki)		Facebook	yes
	(www)(wiki)		MySpace		blog
	(www)(wiki)		Bebo
	(www)(wiki)		Hi5
	(www)(wiki)		Orkut
Media Sharing
	(www)(wiki)		YouTube	yes	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Flickr	yes *	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Picasa	yes	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Veoh	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Uber
Bookmarking
	(www)(wiki)		del.icio.us	yes	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Simpy	yes	yes
	(www)(wiki)		StumbleUpon
Blogging
	(www)(wiki)		Blogger	yes
	(www)(wiki)		LiveJournal	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Technorati	yes
	(www)(wiki)		Twitter	yes
News
	(www)(wiki)		Digg	yes
Music
	(www)(wiki)		last.fm	yes	yes
Community Aggregarors	(www)(wiki)		Mashable

* Requires agreement for commercial use.

Just updated Neptune’s Blogger profile. I added an addition blog on Blogger to host documents published from Google Docs.

Neptune’s Blogger profile:

http://www.blogger.com/profile/17531511657077227390

Neptune’s Docs on Blogger:

http://neptunesdocs.blogspot.com/

I will be writing more regarding Google Docs soon.

Neptune’s Lab is now a real blog! Finally showing up on Technorati, along with 94 million other blogs. I really like the “What Neptune’s Lab is about” tag cloud.

http://www.technorati.com/blogs/neptune.dilated.org

I did not submit Neptune’s Lab to Technorati so their spider must have been picked up a link from another site or feed. I will sign up Neptune as a Technorati user soon and explore all of its features in a later post.

Technorati appears to have an API with a ton of potential for content aggregation. The Technorati API documentation can be found here.

Key features are…

Search

cosmos - Blogs linking to a given URL.
search -Blog posts featuring a given keyword or phrase.
tag - Blog posts tagged with a specific topic.

Browse

toptags - Top tags indexed by Technorati.

Blog information

bloginfo - Information about a specific blog URL such as link counts, rank, and available feeds.

blogposttags - The top tags used by a specific blog.

Member Information

getinfo - Information about a Technorati member such as full name and other blogs by the same author.

YouTube automatically generates a number of RSS feeds. A couple of custom feeds I find terrible useful are user and tag.

Tags:
For example, if you wanted to create an RSS feed for the tag “monkey,” you would enter: feed://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/monkey.rss

Users:
feed://www.youtube.com/rss/user/[insert username here]/videos.rss
For example, if you wanted to create an RSS feed for the user “YouTube,” you would enter: feed://www.youtube.com/rss/user/youtube/videos.rss

Of course I used FeedBurner to burn my YouTube user feed. I have the feed syndicated on the side bar here at neptune.dilated.org.

Here is a link to a YouTube feed for the tag “neptuneslab”. The videos have no propigated to the feed at the time of this posting. Once I see the tag feed working I will burn it with FeedBurner.

Neptune now has a YouTube profile. After downloading the music video I made on eyespot I have uploaded it to YouTube. See below:

Eyespot is good for editing a bunch of clips together. The editing interface is very, very simple and much more constraining than JumpCut (one effect per clip, no title overlays) and a pain if you want to sync anything to audio.

However eyespot has a few killer features such as alloing you to download the video (now I can re-post it to YouTube,) they also give you the ability to “one click” syndicate to LiveJournal, Veoh, and blip.tv.

Here is a link to Neptune’s blog on eyespot.

Below is embedded content from Neptune’s first eyespot edited video.

After months of filming, the grueling location, the blood and the sweat, Neptune’s first and final music video is in the can. Actually it’s on JumpCut.

I shot a few clips of “Neptune’s Little Helpers” in action. Uploaded them along with an mp3 I wrote called “Ready Corona”. It took about 10 minutes to add effects, edit the clips to length, add titling and transitions. I am really impressed with how easy it was to use JumpCut. Even with the limitations of online editing you could probably pull off something a cut above any used car lot cable commercials.

I’ll be adding a Neptune’s JumpCut feed to FeedBurner and syndicating it to the side bar here at neptune.dilated.org.

Neptune set up a JumpCut account for online video editing. JumpCut is a Yahoo property. A few major competitors to JumpCut are eyespot.com, motionbox.com and photobucket.com to name a few. I went with JumpCut this time around simply for the yahoo tie-in. Companies like Google and Yahoo buy up 2.0 sites and quickly integrate them into their core services. Google’s Blogger photos automatically showing up in your Picasa web album is the kind of integration im looking for since Yahoo and Google both support rich API’s for extening and exploiting their functionality.

Check out Neptune’s JumpCut profile at:

http://www.jumpcut.com/neptune

Neptune now has a last.fm account. At the moment I am concentrating on blog syndication and as you can see I have Neptune’s last.fm blog headlines syndicated on the neptune.dilated.org sidebar. I like to run all feeds through FeedBurner, check out Neptune’s last.fm blog feed below.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NeptunesLastfm

last.fm recently played tracks feed.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NeptunesRecentlyPlayedTracks

Check the neptune.dilated.org side bar for a last.fm quite of favorite artists. I love it!

At first glance last.fm looks like it could have some mashup/syndication potential beyond blogging. Stay tuned for a further analysis of features.

last.fm lets you add music as an atrist or label. As an artist I’ll be adding tracks soon.

No problems syndicating Neptune’s new blog on MySpace. MySpace bloggs output RSS making them consumable. At this stage I do not know if there are other ways to pull other additional content from a MySpace profile. I imagine that I could make develop a script to scrape comments posted to my profile. I’ll look into that some day.

At this point it looks like the best thing is to syndicate blog posts from MySpace (as a content provider) and syndicate content to facebook (as a content aggregator). Of course the other direction is possible with flash widgets on myspace and facebook applications on facebook. Is your head spinning yet?