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.

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?

Twitter is a kind of micro blog, a cross between a blogging tool and IM (Instant Message). Twitter is intended to let everyone know what you are doing right now. Depending on your security prefrence you may allow anyone or only friends to subscribe to your updates. In public most you can syndicate your entries.

Neptune now has an account on twitter (twitter.com) as you can see on the side bar here at neptune.dilated.org.

I see a log of potential in Twitter, espically the 2-way SMS allows you to update as well as keep keep track of your friends.

Below is a photo uploaded from a camera phone to Neptune’s blogger account.

Neptune uses blogger to update his mobile blog. I have decided to use neptunesmobile.blogspot.com and have blogger host the mobile blog rathan than their very cool FTP option.

I tried the FTP option and had blogger update another subdomain on dilated.org. However the import option from WordPress required the blog to be hosted by blogger. Another option is to point the DNS on the subdomain to blogger. Since cPanel makes DNSing subdomains a pain I opted to just use the neptunesmobile.blospot.com domain.

I plan to have Neptune email a few photos to his new mobile blog along with other interesting ways to make it useful.

WordPress has an import and export feature to many popular blogging sites and software (Blogware, DotClear, GreyMatter, LiveJournal, MovableType and TypePad, Textpattern and WordPress,) however this is a bit of a manual process since you have to login as an administrator and click the import button. This feature seem to be intended to help you migrate you blog content from one system to another and not really for of syndication.

I will be exploring various syndication options from Neptune’s Mobile Blog on Blogge. Trying everything from simple RSS to Feedburner and hopefully Google’s API.