Comments on: RSSmeme Leverages the FriendFeed API

By: calebelston

calebelston — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:52:27 +0000

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.

By: calebelston

calebelston — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:52:27 +0000

By: Benjamin Golub

Benjamin Golub — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:57:42 +0000

And this story is even already in RSSmeme! http://www.rssmeme.com/story/868407/

Wow things are fast now!

By: Benjamin Golub

Benjamin Golub — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:54:22 +0000

Here's a great example of how fast RSSmeme is now: http://friendfeed.com/e/96449d86-3970-11dd-a24e...

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!

By: Benjamin Golub

Benjamin Golub — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:08:08 +0000

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).

By: J. Phil

J. Phil — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:04:14 +0000

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?

By: Benjamin Golub

Benjamin Golub — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:52:29 +0000

"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!