Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog

Feed Splicing, Part I

We just launched the first version of a new service this evening that we're very excited about. The service allows users of the photo sharing site Flickr to splice their public photos into another feed (like a blog feed). The announcement about our partnership can be found here.

Many of our publishers have expressed the desire to be able to use different publishing tools for different purposes (eg, a blogging tool, a bookmarks tool, a photo sharing tool, etc.) but still have one resulting feed that friends, family, and subscribers could access. Tonight's announcement is a fun step in this direction.

We believe that feed splicing begins to really deliver on the promise of syndication, and that as people begin to use more and more different tools to publish and communicate, feed splicing will be a great way to easily extend your existing communication channels without the need to manage multiple feeds.

This new capability begins to expose part of the real vision for FeedBurner. There are many publishing/media/communication channels that make up an organization or individual's digital personality. Currently, when we want to communicate our images, thoughts, bookmarks, favorite music, etc., we must find the appropriate publishing mechanism, and then separately find an appropriate sharing and communication mechanism. One aspect of the FeedBurner vision is that there should be a simple channel for these communications - a single feed that I can create for subscribers, customers, friends, family that provides a vehicle for communicating the results of all my digital publishing efforts across a spectrum of media, formats, etc. This would give publishers the ability to use favorite but perhaps disparate publishing tools, while still providing one simple communications channel for sharing the results. A long and round about way of saying "i want to use this for my blog, this for my music, this for my pictures, and here's my feed".

We know that many of our publishers already use Flickr, but if you don't, we really encourage you to check it out, as they have come up with some very inventive and compelling ways of tagging and managing photos.

One final note: we will be concentrating our efforts over the next few weeks on partner APIs, customer commitments, and transitioning our infrastructure to a more robust configuration, as previously discussed here. So the new services and announcements will be light. There are a lot of exciting things happening, and we hope to have plenty to say when we come out of hiding in a few weeks.