Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog

Attention Developers: FeedFlare Open API

We have been talking about our plugin for web services for a couple months now. We call it FeedFlare, and we've already released a small default catalog of FeedFlare units that publishers can include in their feeds and on their sites. FeedFlare has been the fastest growing service in the brief history of FeedBurner, with over 10,000 feeds already using the service. The really big idea, however, was always the notion of providing a universal framework/API to enable any third-party web service to integrate with a publisher's content, without concern over what content management system the publisher is using.

Today, in conjunction with the Future of Web Apps conference in London, we are releasing the complete version 1.0 FeedFlare API and associated documentation. Any FeedFlare "unit" built according to these specs can now be incorporated by any publisher using FeedBurner. This post is long on technology details (and the documentation is longer on them still!), so if angle brackets test your will, now would be a good time to skip to the FeedFlare for Publishers section below.

Developer API Details
To provide an introduction to this API for all the interested developers out there, we have created the FeedFlare API Developer Guide. Of course, there are questions, and of course, we'll have answers. Please visit the new FeedBurner for Developers support forums specifically for developers with questions about, you guessed it, the FeedFlare API. For blitting issues, please seek other counsel.

Being the initial release, you'll find that the API is a little light on diagnostic tools to assist development of these Flare units. Please look at these Tips for Testing and visit the support forum for any questions. We'll be listening to your feedback and expanding our toolkit for developers.

FeedFlare for Publishers
If you look at the FeedFlare service setup form on the Optimize tab for any of your feeds at FeedBurner, you can see that there are spaces for three "custom" Flares. Flares are identified by URLs, so if someone has developed a Flare unit that you want like to use in your feed or site, just enter the URL into one of these fields and check the Feed and/or Site checkboxes next to it. This form is a bit "rustic" right now: look for some significant improvements, including an expanded catalog, in the next couple of weeks.

One other note: as you're adding or removing Flare units from your feed, it may cause the items in your feed to show up as modified. Making Flare changes only apply to "future items" is another thing we'll address soon, but for now you may want to burn another version of your feed and experiment on that version until you have things the way you want it. Once you've got your FeedFlare service setup finalized, however, the items will not be marked as modified even as the information is updated in the individual Flares.

101 Flare Ideas
There are all manner of services that can be integrated into a page or feed of content with FeedFlare. We've compiled a list of “101 Flares for a Better Tomorrow” that developers or companies could build. As Flares are built and publishers adopt them, we will add some of these to a catalog we maintain in the publisher services dashboard.

As you look through the 101 ideas, some themes emerge. First, companies can build Flares for their own content! An organization with multiple properties, for example, might want a Flare that promotes content from other properties in their feed, or a company might want Flare that links to a "related posts" query that's internal to the company. Secondly, there are really two kinds of Flare: Action and Meta-Data.

• Action Flare allow you to "do" something with or to a piece of content: tag it in del.icio.us, mail it, seed it as a story at Newsvine, translate it into Finnish, and otherwise bend it to your will.
• Meta-Data Flare tell you things about how other parts of the web perceive this content: how highly linked this article is in the blogosphere, where this content originated on a map (e.g., a photo in a feed with its geographic data could be plugged into a mapping API), and so on.

We are really excited to provide this API to help integrate the worlds of content and web services. We think all the tools are here to make integration smooth and straightforward. Dive in and let us know what you think. Direct your questions and feedback to the FeedBurner for Developers support forum and we will be sure to respond and react as quickly as possible.