Friend Feed Syndication
Sun, August 30th 2009 at 11:25pm
I have been considering ways to aggregate my content from Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and Google Reader for a little while now. The best way seemed to be to make my own plugin that would pull data in from these various sources and allow me to display it on custom pages on my site. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that this is just what Friend Feed does already. It pulls all your “stuff” into one place and gives you a running feed of all that content.
So I thought I would just grab the RSS from Friend Feed important it and do some minor manipulation on the data for what I wanted. But I was quite shocked to see that Friend Feed inserts display styles and HTML into their RSS feed which makes it very hard to parse and manipulate the data. The Friend Feed engineers are meant to be top Google people and it was quite surprising to me the way they mixed all the display syntax into a data sharing format. It basically makes the feed useless for any application other than having a Friend Feed like box on your site.
So now I am back to designing/coding/using Wordpress modules to do it. Gina Trapani’s Twitalytic looks awesome, and I am thinking of looking over that code and seeing if it will work as a general aggregator with interesting stats to boot.
Tags: codemonkeyx.net, Development, Friend Feed, Web
