Had another chance to play with FeedLounge and they seem to be coming along nicely. FeedLounge is what would happen if Bloglines and Oddpost (or Yahoo Mail Beta) had a baby. Simple and basic but with Ajaxy goodness.
They might lack some features of a NetNewsWire or a Rojo but honestly this can be a big win. Less to support and less confusion among your users.
One thing I really don’t like is their Ajax/DHTML dialog boxes although I admit this is a pet peeve of mine. I just think these really don’t belong on the web as they’re totally inaccessible. Just use a regular dialog box. I complained about Attensa doing the same thing.
I wish they had an OPML export API so I could add them to TailRank (hint hint!). Hopefully I’ll ship an API for clients wishing to upload their OPML into TailRank but this might have to wait a few weeks.
It’s all going to be about the API in 2006. More online RSS aggregators need APIs. Don’t work on the frontend. Just let some brilliant Ajax developers mash you up… Oh… and your API needs to be RESTian or don’t even bother.
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January 12, 2006 at 7:38 pm
Kevin: If you go to Settings, use the popup box you hate, and go to Profile, you can grab your OPML. It’s not 100% obvious, but it’s still pretty easy-to-find or -tell-folks-where-it-is.
January 12, 2006 at 7:59 pm
Yeah…. the issue is that it needs to be an API.
OPML won’t work without an API..
January 12, 2006 at 8:12 pm
Thanks for the nice pointer :)
I agree; 2006 is the year of the Aggregator API. Maybe we can mash some of this stuff up at Mash Pitt on Tuesday?
January 13, 2006 at 5:46 am
What current Web app would you consider to have a great API, Kevin?
January 13, 2006 at 10:06 am
Was nice meeting you at MacWorld, and thanks for the kind words about FeedLounge. :)
Once we get our beta out the door, we’re going to be quickly turning our attention to creating a few requested APIs.
Drop me a line and let me know what you’d like to see, and we’ll see what we can do.
January 13, 2006 at 10:25 am
What type of API are you referring to Kevin? An API to get the entire OPML from all of FeedLounge?
OPML export is just a URL today, does it just need 401 auth or???
January 13, 2006 at 12:13 pm
The OPML export API could be RESTian by adding 401 auth and using a static URL. /api/opml for example.
This is essentially how NewsGator’s API works. I’d love to see more people implement this.
Maybe clone the Bloglines API? I’m not sure how many implementations are out in the wild for this.
Kevin
April 21, 2006 at 9:54 am
Kevin, we’ve added an API for accessing a user’s feed list via OPML, RSS and HTML.