Bloglines Web Services

Tomorrow morning around 5am Pacific Time, a press release with the title New Bloglines Web Services Selected by FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Blogbot to Eliminate RSS Bandwidth Bottleneck will go out, but I’m so excited I’m going to blog about it now. So what is this? First, continuing a tradition we started with the notifiers, we’re augmenting the data that you can pull out of Bloglines programmatically. We’re calling the new functions the Bloglines Web Services and we’ve launched a whole new part of the web site to document them. The new functionality lets a program pull Bloglines subscription data as well as blog entries, using the OPML and RSS formats. So what does this mean? If you’re a desktop aggregator developer, you can use Bloglines to provide a sync’ing capability for your users. And you don’t have to worry about supporting the different RSS and Atom formats (and various imperfect feeds), because Bloglines normalizes all data. If you’re a publisher thinking about entering the world of RSS, you don’t have to worry about thousands of desktop aggregators pummeling your servers into oblivion. With the Bloglines Web Services, Bloglines acts as a feed cache, insulating content providers from bandwidth problems. What makes this announcement extra special, of course, is that the leading desktop aggregators are announcing support for the Bloglines Web Services. FeedDemon has a beta version available now with support built-in, and NetNewsWire and BlogBot will be launching new versions soon. We’ve been working on this for awhile now, and I’ve gotta say that Nick, Brent and Dru are great people to work with. I’ll have more to say later, but I wanted to be “First Post” with the news.