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.

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.

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?

Neptune now has his facebook account configured.

Syndicating content into face book is easy and there are a number of ways to do it.

1. You can add an RSS or ATOM feed link to your notes application.
2. There are a few 3rd party RSS facebook applications you can install and configure.

Syndicating content from facebook is not a core feature. They do this to protect privacy (however they could easily allow you to have the option).

the developed facebook application would need to be installed by the user. This application can syndicate content back to the developer. I’ll be writing a facebook app for Neptune in the coming days.

Everyone loves chicklets. Here are a few chicklets that will syndicate Neptune’s Lab.

The feeds are burned!

This was a good test of Blogger’s new feature allowing you to redirect all feed traffic to FeedBurner. Neptune’s Mobile (neptunesmobile.blogspot.com) is a Blogger blog syndicated via FeedBurnder at http://feeds.feedburner.com/NeptunesMobile.

Here is a lift of all the feeds so far:

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/NeptunesLab
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/CommentsForNeptunesLab
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/NeptunesMobile

I guess I need to add the chicklets to the Lab.

I will also be adding the FeedBurner syndication widget to Neptune’s Mobile.

Displaying content syndicated from Blogger is easy since Google has adopted the Atom standard throughout most of it’s properties.

Atom is a popular RSS syndication standard, however Atom differers from RRS 2.0 in a few ways. Notible differences are in required content and payload. Read More about these differences if they are important to you.

Through WordPress I quickly added an RSS widget to my sidebar. Of course the RSS widget only displays the post titles I could easily consume the entire post. Here is a link to Neptune’s Atom fee from Blogger.

http://neptunesmobile.blogspot.com/atom.xml (this may begin redirecting to FeedBurner)

I am about to explore possibilities with FeedBurner re-syndicating Neptune’s blogger feed. Google has acquired FeedBurner and Blogger (also a Google property) recently announced some tighter integration, allowing your Blogger feed to redirect to FeedBurner. This redirection help keep everyone syndicating from you all getting the feed from the same place. Additionally since feed burner offers usage Statistics along with a bunch of other goodies like automatic links to Digg and del.icio.us it’s a good idea to keep everyone on the FeedBurner feed.