Looks like I was a day too soon with Filtering Feeds… Yahoo!’s new entry into the mashup marketplace with Yahoo! Pipes has some amazing potential.

By potential, I mean that it is probably cool once they get it working… I’m guessing they didn’t anticipate the load they’re hit with this morning. I’ve seen more of this than I care to count:

Once they get their servers massaged back into shape, everybody and their brother will be piping away. Hat tip to Yahoo! if they pull this off.

Thanks to Giovanni Guardalben for the tip this weekend:

Marjolein Hoekstra and Todd And have used a bunch of free tools to create a OPML/RSS mashup called Kitchen Sink. They have NewsGator, FeedBurner, MySyndicaat, and Grazr in the mix to create a boutique search engine and feed source for a select group of blogs. (In this case, that group is from the list of Todd’s 150 Top Marketing Blogs. If marketing isn’t your thing, you could do the same approach with any OPML file.)

How it Works

Here’s the basic flow: OPML reading list of feeds from Todd’s Newsgator Online account. The OPML is then pulled into MySyndicaat to pull together the actual content of all of the RSS and Atom feeds into a river of news. The massive combined RSS feed that results is then prettied up in FeedBurner.

From there they used the very-beta GrazrScript (and a lot of help from Mike at Grazr) to create a GUI that lets you explore the data from the feed, using ReFilter to filter content based on keywords.

Kitchen Sink also lets you subscribe to a custom feed of your keyword searches… you’ll only get items from the blog list that have your keywords.

Wish List

I would like to see the Kitchen Sink widget hooked directly to MySyndicaat (using ReFilter in the GUI). That would cover the bare minimum of technologies needed and still deliver the desired end state: Choose/find your sources in MySyndicaat, and let them do the work of pulling the feeds and storing the master content. Use GrazrScript for the front end, and ReFilter for on-demand filtering of the master content.

Trouble Spots

1. I don’t know how well ReFilter will hold up under a heavy load, but I’m betting that if your user base is in the hundreds or low thousands, it should be fine. Hopefully they have a good bandwidth usage plan, (or a good cache scheme) since they have to re-read the feed every time.

2. The lynch pin, of course, is that the Grazr guys probably aren’t going to be able to do custom work for everybody who asks. My guess is development of GrazrScript will need to mature for awhile before this kind of approach is widely possible for the geek masses.

Update February 6, 2007

I chatted with Marjolein this morning about Kitchen Sink, congratulating her on making TechMeme for so long yesterday. Marjolein noted that although she has “less hair” because of various issues she had to work through in GrazrScript, the Grazr team didn’t need to contribute much. She did note that they readily squashed any bugs she found in GS, so that aspect of their support was invaluable. (Mike at Grazr also commented below on his involvement, and believes that GS is more mature than I state above.)

When does it become a bad idea to not handle the competition’s format?

Dave Winer, the creator of RSS 2.0 and Radio Userland’s RSS Aggregator, chides a friend for switching from RSS to Atom:

I was subscribing to your feed, generally reading all your updates, and now I see the feed moved…. I saw that your new feed isn’t RSS, to which I ask — why?? Do you want to lose subscribers?

The position he’s taking, of course, is that there is no practical reason to use Atom (if there were, his own Radio Userland software would support it). Now he’s put himself out on a ledge where he has to ask people to stay on RSS, rather than just support Atom.

Let’s face it, support for both formats isn’t just commonplace, it is expected. To whit:

James Roberson notes:

Dave Winer must be the only guy on the planet with a newsreader that can’t handle Atom.

The comments on Roberson’s post are growing, but here are a few telling tidbits:

Rogers Cadenhead: I’m not aware of any newsreader outside of Radio UserLand and Manila that doesn’t support Atom 1.0

Asbjørn Ulsberg: The only reason Dave can’t read Atom feeds is because his software doesn’t support it. And the reason it doesn’t is politically based, not technically.

Elliotte Rusty Harold: Sooner or later they’ll upgrade when more and more of the feeds they want to aggregate are no longer available in RSS.

Dave, I think it’s time to rethink your position. If your goal is to provide software that is useful to people, why not handle the Atom format gracefully? Heck, even Microsoft Word can read other document formats. That doesn’t mean Redmond is admitting defeat, it just means good software is flexible, and there might be something other than .doc out there.

Like it or not, Atom 1.0 exclusivity is growing. Why not give yourself and your users a chance to read the content, even if you don’t like the package it comes in?

Saletastic.com has announced a service whereby you can get an RSS feed of coupons from over 130 merchants. You do need to create an account (to manage your options), but you do not need to provide an email address. You can also add the coupons to your Yahoo, MSN, or Google Portal (ig) homepage. Very nice.

Here’s an example feed: http://www.saletastic.com/rss/userrss/test.rss

The RSS 2.0 feed has a couple of minor validation problems (as of this writing), but all-in-all a nice way to go. Since you don’t know until you sign up, here’s an exhaustive list of the merchants who currently provide coupons through the service:

Sometimes old ideas can still be good ones. Now where’s the coupon for those nose hair trimmers?

Dear Amar Ghandi, Group Program Manager of the Windows RSS team,
You guys actually invented the RSS parser and feed API? Your patent claim is baffling:

“A content syndication platform, such as a web content syndication platform, manages, organizes and makes available for consumption content that is acquired from the Internet. In at least some embodiments, the platform can acquire and organize web content, and make such content available for consumption by many different types of applications. These applications may or may not necessarily understand the particular syndication format. An application program interface (API) exposes an object model which allows applications and users to easily accomplish many different tasks such as creating, reading, updating, deleting feeds and the like.”

That describes tons of applications both corporate and open source. Any programmatic API like ROME comes to mind. Did you create the RSS Platform in Windows Vista before all of them? Please do tell, I’m all ears.
(More objections by Dave Johnson here. CNET coverage here.)