AideRSS Rebrands as PostRank, Launches New Features, API

Since its launch, AideRSS has aimed to leverage social tools to help determine a publisher's most popular content, through analysis of individual posts and their related activity, including Diggs, bookmarks on Delicious, links in Google, and total comments. RSS advocates suffering from information overload have even turned to AideRSS to act as an intelligent filter, providing them the best stream, rather than the default firehose. With today's new announcements, along with a rebranding as PostRank that saw the launch of a new Web site and look, the service has added tags, keyword filtering, and other tools that will get users to the data they are seeking quickly.

(See from December 2007: AideRSS Judges Feed Posts as Good, Great, Best)


PostRank Shows Posts With Audience Engagement Have Higher Score
The first major enhancement to the new PostRank is keyword filtering. As Ilya Grigorik wrote, users have asked for the ability to customize and filter any RSS feed with specific keywords. For example, you could get all posts from The Unofficial Apple Weblog that mention iPhone, or posts from Matt Cutts that mention SEO.


I Tagged TUAW as iPhone and Filtered for Only iPhone News
You can also now tag feeds you import into PostRank, helping to build out what the team calls "custom content channels" based on those tags and keywords. All feeds tagged with BlackBerry would be in the BlackBerry channel, etc.

Most interesting to developers may be the introduction of full API access. According to Grigorik, all operations possible on the new postrank.com site are accessible by API, making it easy to utilize the filtering capabilities seen in their service on other applications.

As a blogger, the new PostRank offers better ways to see if specific posts do better with readers and the social services based on keywords. As a consumer, you can now read fewer feed items and still be sure you don't miss those that are most interesting to you. You can find PostRank at http://www.postrank.com. Of course, going to the old AideRSS.com will push you there as well...

Shyftr Reloads With New API, Activity Stream, Widgets and UI

The crowded world of online RSS feed readers is one that's been dominated by names like Google Reader, Bloglines and Netvibes. But underneath that layer you have a few interesting innovative players, including FeedEachOther, and Shyftr. Shyftr came to prominence this spring, drawing attention for a shared comment stream on linked items, and has been quiet for the last few months as they worked on enhancing their platform. Today, they woke up in a big way, revamping the service, while adding an API, activity streams and widgets for bloggers.

Shyftr's main draws continue to be the same. You can add friends on the service, and see which RSS feeds they are following, or have "Shyfted". You can see who else is reading feeds that you have added, which you can do manually, or by OPML. And despite your reading your feeds in your own space, you can make comments and see them shared with the broader Shyftr community, much like other aggregation tools, including FriendFeed and Strands do. But unlike those services, Shyftr deduplicates, providing a single instance for each unique URL.

In addition to the social aspects of Shyftr, the service offers what they call a Pocket blog, the equivalent of a Google shared links blog, letting you see what friends have found interesting, as they "pocket" new items they discover.


Today's announcements set the foundation for Shyftr and for outside developers to further enhance the service. The API can tap into just about every aspect of the service, except for actually reading feeds, Shyftr reported in a blog post this morning. Among the first introductions is a new activity stream, which shows your activity, or that of your friends, as they "Shyft" new feeds, "Pocket" new items, or make comments.


Like FriendFeed and other social tools, you can filter whether you want to see "Everyone's activity", "Friends activity" or just your own activity. You can also view a single individual's stream if you like.

The last addition are embeddable widgets. Every Web service under the sun has a corresponding widget these days, and Shyftr is no different. You can make widgets for your activity stream, for a specific feed, or to show all activity on Shyftr itself.

As Shyftr founder Dave Stanley wrote in this morning's post, the development of an API was critical to expanding the site's social features, and bringing it to be much more than a passive RSS reader. While the service remains small in the shadows of giants, it has set the groundwork for growth. You can see my profile here: http://www.shyftr.com/profile/louisgray.

With Facebook Connect, Google Has Unique Integration Opportunity

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Identi.ca/FriendFeed)


In working with Google FriendConnect recently, I realized that Google has a unique opportunity that perhaps they did not have previously. In only the last few months, Facebook has opened up the opportunity for any 3rd party site to integrate with Facebook, all via a special login button and form Facebook provides. Such technology is enabled through a product Facebook calls Facebook Connect. In playing with Google's product, it enables one to authenticate through other services and allow porting of friend data and more through its FriendConnect interface. I believe Google now may just have the unique opportunity to finally integrate Facebook as they wanted to before.

Several months back, Google attempted to launch FriendConnect with Facebook as one of the launch partners. Facebook quickly pulled Google's app from the Facebook App Store because they claimed it breached the Facebook Terms of Service. Google denied they were doing such, but Facebook insisted, keeping Google from being able to integrate with Facebook. It's unclear what exactly Facebook was claiming Google had done wrong, but it appeared to be some sort of backdoor technique to obtain user information.

Enter Facebook Connect

Several months later, Facebook launched their somewhat competing product, Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect does not integrate with other sites, but does integrate with OpenID similar to the way Google FriendConnect does, and enables you to through simple javascript, allow others to login and integrate their Facebook friends right on their own website.

Because FriendConnect is specific to Facebook, Google could now have just the opportunity to integrate Facebook the way they wanted to. Now, Google simply, and legally, should be able to implement a simple Facebook Connect login button into their user settings interface, let the user log into Facebook, and automatically Google would now have full access to the Facebook API from a third party site as they were trying to do before. Google can now enter in through the front door.

Not only that, but Facebook now allows site owners to identify existing accounts with existing Facebook accounts that have the same e-mail address. If Google were to collect the user's Facebook e-mail, or use their existing assuming it's the same as their Gmail address, they could then identify existing Friends on Google that also have Facebook accounts, allow you to link into them, invite them to begin using your FriendConnect-enabled site, and more.

Why Google has not yet implemented this is beyond me. Perhaps they already have and we are just waiting for Facebook to fully lift the Sandbox they have in place for developers right now. Regardless, I am willing to bet that Facebook integration into Google FriendConnect is coming very soon because of these features. Expect it to come in the form of Facebook Connect.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

BackType Launches Widgets and Alerts to Extend Comments Tracker

At the end of August, BackType launched an interesting tool to track individuals' comments across the Web - no matter the commenting platform and no matter the blog, and letting you subscribe to other BackType users to see their comments, wherever they were. In the last few weeks, BackType launched alerts, letting you follow search terms, and today, they launched widgets which enable you to show the places you are commenting around the Web from a single place, most likely your own blog.

As the world of blogging is changing, tweets on Twitter and comments on blog posts are becoming nearly as important as dedicated posts themselves, and BackType has served as a way to find out what other blogs people you follow read and comment on, or to show who is more likely to launch a new story, yet not participate in the following discussion. The service also serves to show if bloggers tend to only participate in the comments on their own site, and not around the Web - something I myself have been guilty of in some weeks.


BackType's New Alerts and Widgets

Alerts

After logging in to BackType, go to http://www.backtype.com/home/alerts to see how you can follow individual words or search terms, and have them deliver e-mail alerts each day, each week, or in real time. You can even choose to follow terms but keep them on your dashboard, without spawning an e-mail.

Widgets

Just about every service has widgets these days, and the new challenge as a blogger can be which ones to install at the expense of others. If you've got the real estate, BackType's new widget shows you comments you've made across the Web, with a favicon of the blog, and its recency - showing how fresh the comment is. Interestingly, clicking on the widget takes you to the actual comment within BackType, and from there, you can click through to the blog post in question.

In case that wasn't enough, Christopher Golda of BackType says more features are planned. BackType has been expanding their coverage through scouring more and more blogs, has been improving the service's search engine, and they're developing an API. Hot on the heels of Disqus' launch of their own public API. it should be interesting to see how innovation in the comments space is developing.

You can find me on BackType here: http://www.backtype.com/louisgray

Disqus' API Launch Extends Commenting Possibilities

At Blog World Expo last week, I said that those services which "played well with others" would do better in a collaborative, cooperative Web 2.0 landscape over those that instead held tight to their walled gardens (See tweet from @drewolanoff.) It is through the launch of an API and extensive developer activity that services like Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter have grown, often at the expense of those that didn't. Tonight, the popular Web commenting service Disqus joined the fray, launching a full public API.

The API (outlined here) lets services and tools write custom comment import and export tools, or to develop unique plug-ins for their platform. (see the announcement and coverage by The Inquisitr.)

Disqus comments are already among the most portable, enabling syndication through RSS, and into lifestreaming applications of all sorts. But what I found most interesting was the note on custom plugins for customer platforms. What's to stop developers from making a custom Disqus-enabled engine that is secure, and for the enterprise, essentially the comments equivalent of Yammer (versus Twitter)? What I see happening is that many of the social tools we may be using for community and entertainment in our world are now on the verge of making it to the enterprise. With an open development platform, and possibly, the idea to customize the comments engine for services that have enterprise capabilities, this could be one way to break on through to the other side, so to speak.

This week's big commenting news was Automattic buying up Intense Debate, something many thought would make Disqus' world a whole lot harder. Tonight's announcement shows they aren't sitting still and playing the part of victim. I'm eager to see the new services and tools that get developed as a result of being Disqus-powered.

Throttled By the Twitter API? Try Something New.

Guest Post By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Well, the microblogging API space sure got interesting in a hurry.

First, on Thursday, Louis Gray reported that Twitter was throttling unauthenticated API requests. This obviously would effect several applications in a very bad way. Later in the day, Dave Winer let everyone know that Identi.ca has implemented the Twitter API. And on Friday, in a surprising move, TechCrunch announced that Twitter is sending the XMPP firehose to new middle man Gnip.

So, what does this mean to you? Well, that is a good question. First, we know what the Twitter API looks like. Identi.ca replicating the API is good for interoperability as well. Yes, they copied the main Twitter API, but have yet to include the searching capabilities that Summize supplies. However, they do have RSS feeds for any search query which does suffice for basic searching. The other big players in the microblogging space, Jaiku and Pownce, also have APIs. But, what do they have to offer?

Jaiku's API contains the usual suspects, the public feed, a user's feed and a user's profile. It also allows for "presence" updates which is helpful for allowing applications like Ping.fm to post to multiple services. It also provides a method to get a user's current "presence", their last item in the "presence" stream and as well as a specific item in the "presence" stream.

Pownce's API is similar as well. There is a public "note" list, a user's note list (which can be filtered for replies, private messages and other coolness) and a user's profile. You can also retrieve a specific note, with replies included optionally, and the list of recipients for the note. For social graph fans, you can get the friends (mutual relationship) of a user, fans of the user and who the user is a fan of. For posting notes, there is the normal post method as well as separate post link, event, file and reply methods.

Interestingly, there is a method to determine the list of users a post can go to. There are some other minor goodies like feeds for the public list and a user as well as simple web post integration. Obviously, this is an API designed with developers in mind. They thought of several different ways to use the application and provided APIs accordingly. The only problem that I could see is that there is no search supported. Hopefully a third party service like Gnip will fill that void, like Summize did for Twitter.

Now that looks like a good foundation, but there are some fundamental problems. It is not obvious that Pownce and Jaiku support something like an XMPP feed, so, there may not be the ability to have the full public stream at all times. This type of thing is critical for interoperability. There is also inconsistent support for threaded messages and other post types (like the Pownce event and file posts). Why haven't we seen a real multi-microblog client? Ping.fm is doing multi-writes, but does not support multi-reads. In the instant messaging world, where the XMPP standard comes from, we do have multi-chat clients and few actually support XMPP! We are starting to see some standardization in this space as well with Identi.ca copying the Twitter API as well. If we consider the Twitter API a defacto standard and we have the XMPP standard for real time transfer, there should be little stopping developers from creating the ultimate micro-blogging client.

Now, the question is, are you willing to wait or do you want to crown someone king?