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RSSmeme Leverages the FriendFeed API

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I just caught a post by Benjamin Golub, the developer of RSSmeme, in which he reveals some upcoming changes to his popular service:

RSSmeme is about to be faster than ever at finding the hot news of the day. Everyone knows that FriendFeed is fast; and I’m not talking about the speed at which the site loads (which is very fast). FriendFeed is extremely quick at crawling. RSSmeme takes 7 hours to do a round trip of it’s nearly 15000 feeds but FriendFeed is able to pick up your shared items in minutes.

My take? Well, if you are looking to hitch your wagon somewhere, making use of a nearly unrestricted API for one of the internet’s (or is that internets’) fastest growing social aggregation networks is brilliant. Just to put this in context, let’s take a look at Alexa’s idea of FriendFeed’s web presence:

alexa-ff

Ok, ok, it does appear that FriendFeed has a ways to go to catch up with the likes of Twitter. But it got a big boost in popularity during WWDC and early indications appear that people are staying on the service.

Returning to RSSmeme, this is an interesting development that definitely will give the service a unique flavor. Along with fast search and index results, I am guessing we are going to see weightings start to be subtly influenced by FriendFeed use as well.

posted June 13th, 2008 in Related | Tags: , , ,

  • Ben, That is super cool. Leveraging from open API's is going to be critical for success moving forward as services become more and more specialized in their area of expertise. The centuries old economic principle of division of labor is finally making it's way to web services in a real way.
  • Here's a great example of how fast RSSmeme is now: http://friendfeed.com/e/96449d86-3970-11dd-a24e-003048343a40/RSSmeme-Long-Exposure-Shots-In-St-Petersburg/

    A 4 hour story has 26 (and counting) shares already! That same story in ReadBurner is at 8. RSSmeme used to take up to 20 hours to find that many shares for a story!
  • And this story is even already in RSSmeme! http://www.rssmeme.com/story/868407/

    Wow things are fast now!
  • "Along with fast search and index results, I am guessing we are going to see weightings start to be subtly influenced by FriendFeed use as well."

    You won't be seeing any changes to weight; it's still 1 share = 1 vote. The only difference is how I find out what you are sharing. Now I have 2 methods. 1) is the old way where I pull down your shared feed and 2) is the new way where I poll the public FriendFeed API feed with a filter for Google Reader only.

    So it's really no difference; if RSSmeme finds your share through FriendFeed it still counts as a share from you and counts as 1 vote. When RSSmeme later finds that same share through Google Reader it won't double count your vote and it won't create any duplicates; it just updates the information with all that wonderful meta data (tags, source, author, and content) that FriendFeed doesn't track.

    Thanks for covering this!
  • Ok, gotcha, thanks for the clarification. However, you are using FriendFeed as a source for new google reader shared items URLs correct? So in the case of FriendFeed growing as an aggregator, your site directly benefits from that diversity?
  • Yes; but that's always been the case :) RSSmeme has been polling FriendFeed
    for new Google Reader feeds to follow since before there was even a
    FriendFeed API (I scraped the site back then).
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