Yesterday I posted some, as it turns out, unfounded concerns about FeedBurner’s new FeedFlare features and how they would impact me as a reader of many great blog authors who use FeedBurner’s service. Thanks again to Eric and Dick from FeedBurner for helping me get the facts straight. Today, I’m putting on my feed reader developer
The way that FeedBurner avoids having an item’s content update whenever the Flare is updated is by using images to show the (textual) infomation. This handles the reader’s experience very well, but what about the feed reader developer’s? FeedBurner is doing a bunch of work to get lots of great information, why isn’t that information also passed along in a way that FeedLounge can use it?
Let’s take the Technorati link cosmos as an example. If FeedLounge were to include a “show Technorati link cosmos” feature (which we certainly might do at some point), we’d be duplicating the work that FeedBurner has already done. If FeedBurner were to include the title and URL of each of the cosmos links in the feed, we could check for that first before we hit Technorati for the information.
The ‘Post to del.icio.us’ link is a different example. By including this in the item content, they ensure that the feature is available – however as a feed reader developer, the ‘post to del.icio.us’ feature I might add becomes redundant. It’s an interesting problem – one that I’m sure the folks at FeedBurner have spent a lot more time thinking about than I have. I’d like to know some of the thought process behind the chosen features.
If it sounds like I’m asking to have it both ways – you’re right. On the one hand, I want my nice feed reading experience – on the other hand, I want to create a superior feed reading experience for my users. These two perspectives give me different and sometimes slightly contradictory ways of seeing something – I’m well aware of the irony. 🙂
Since we don’t know exactly what the FeedFlare API will look like yet, it’s possible that FeedBurner has these angles covered already. If not, perhaps they’ll consider these ideas for the future.
This post is part of the project: FeedLounge. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
I don’t see why they can’t have that other data in the feed AND the images that make it nice on the user side of things.
Good luck with the cosmos stuff, technorati’s API seems to be hit or miss so far for me. Sometimes it likes you and responds, other times it doesn’t like you and returns no results (even though there are results to be returned). I sent them an email through the developers part of their site, but no response yet.
As I understand it, adding the data to the feed in a structured way would require extensions the the RSS/Atom specs. The thing about putting it both places is the potential redundancy – I’m not sure if there is a good solution to this or not, but one way would be got a feed reader to announce it’s display capabilities/features when requesting the feed and get back appropriate data, etc. Of course, this would need to be formalized w/ a spec, yada-yada.
Thank you for your thoughts on this, Alex. To tell you the truth, we hadn’t thought about including this information as separate elements in the feed, but there is certainly the potential to do that if you would find that valuable.
How it would have to work is that we would insert one element per item per flare that would have a type attribute set to some uri that would identify what kind of flare. The text of that element would be whatever the text that is currently being shown. So, there might have to be some “uri” matching and some string parsing, possibly, to get some value out of that. And we’d have to ensure that changing those values would not mark the items as modified over time. Given those constraints, would you still find that valuable?
We appreciate your input!
Assuming I properly understood everything you explained, then yes – that sounds quite good. We’d be happy to review any example feeds with this data, etc. if that would be helpful.
I think that type of thing would be quite valuable! Thanks for the offer, Eric 🙂
Seriously, the entire feed world should be jumping on these sorts of extensions to give the user as much information as they wish to consume.