RSS and Atom Mashups: MySyndicaat
A couple of months ago Giovanni Guardalben (of HiT Syndicaat) gave me peek at a new service they are working on: MySyndicaat.
Robin Good’s interview of Giovanni bills MySyndicaat as a service for “search professionals”. He’s right, but the new interface and feature set are something that any RSS/Atom enthusiast can take advantage of. If you subscribe to a lot of feeds, read on…
MySyndicaat centers around the concept of a FeedBot, which is an agent you create to get content from the web on a regular basis. The FeedBot is composed of multiple Subscriptions, each defined by you, that pulls in the contents of an RSS or Atom feed, HTML page, or one of a myriad of content providers. Rather than list them all, here’s the select box lifted straight out of MySyndicaat:
I’ve watched this list grow over the last two months, so I don’t doubt there are more on the way. What makes it so handy is that you don’t have to go out and figure out the URL / REST structure of these sites… MySyndicaat already knows it. You just need to supply the search and filtering criteria to get back what you want.
On the subject of filtering, you aren’t just subscribing to feeds based on certain criteria, you can also filter at the item level. That is huge. Here’s why:
The standard granularity of RSS and Atom subscriptions these days is at the feed level. If you like a feed, you subscribe to it, hoping that enough of the items therein will be worth your time. And even though you like the feed, chances are good you will end up skimming and deleting a lot of stuff that you don’t really care about.
MySyndicaat, however, gives you the ability to toss (or keep) any feed items that match your filter criteria. For example, you could subscribe to the Slashdot feed, but automatically toss any items about SCO. Or, if you work in Redmond’s public relations department, you might only keep items about Microsoft and Linux. MySyndicaat offers an unprecedented way to filter the Matrix down to exactly what interests you.
Now for the fun part: Each MySyndicaat feedbot is exposed as a single secured RSS feed. That means all of the mashed-up, filtered subscriptions within the feedbot can be delivered to your own RSS/Atom reader in a single clean, secured RSS feed. Ah, the simple life.
Happy Feeding.
