Feedonomics

We wanted to continue on the path of exercising our technology as a complete platform for OPML and feeds, so we have built a custom application that lets you browse the social graph of friends on Twitter. First we created an open API that gathers the information we needed from the Twitter API, and makes it available to anyone who wants to build their own Twitter application. This is a higher level API than Twitter’s, because it delivers complete OPML files and feeds with much more information. We plan on following this path with future applications. Grazr Corp. is about much more than a simple (well, not that simple) widget.

Then we built the Grazr Twitter Reader on top of this API that incorporates many of Grazr’s features, including a custom theme, and a built-in search form created with GrazrScript. I’ve been having so much fun with Dave Winer’s Twittergram.com, that I also got the coders to build Twittergram support into this app. The Twitter Reader works in the same destinations as one of our normal widgets, so you can add it to any web page or run it on the iPhone. We even built on what we learned from our first Facebook app, and created an easy install for your Facebook profile. You will find complete installation instructions for this application in our Tools section.

This is just our first version of a Twitter tool. We have plans to incorporate posting, following, and many other Twitter functions into later versions. We also expect to build more Grazr applications for other online services, so please let us know what sites you would like to see us work with, like Digg, eBay, or Flickr?

So, what would you use this application for? Well, you could use it to keep track of Robert Scoble’s ever growing media empire: 

 

 

Most of what I see active adult users of Facebook doing is basically spam. They are using statuses, newsfeeds, mini-feeds, application notifications as ways of pushing their message out to their “friends.” I haven’t heard a good name for this practice, but anyone who coins that phrase will get lifelong immortality, just as the originators of spam received. We could just call it spam, but clever phrases usually accompany paradigm shifts: Ajax, social networking, Web 2.0. Facebook is definitely a paradigm shift for the software world. It is the tipping point. See what I mean? You thought of Malcolm Gladwell just then, didn’t you?

I now get Twitter, at least one aspect of it, but I still haven’t found much benefit from using Facebook. So I decided to try it as a discussion group. This week we found a number of oddities in navigating the Twitter friends network using their API, and I’m sure we will find problems with other social network APIs. There are existing groups for Twitter specifically, and for the effects of social networks on society, even for how to get rich on social networks, but none seem to approach it from a developer’s perspective. It would be great to have a place to discuss technical issues with other software developers across a wide range of platforms and tools. The group I started is called Browsing the Social Graph, and it’s open for anyone to join.

I know I’ll get some “Hey, you just started with this stuff” comments, but I learn how to do things by doing them. I’ll learn how to build tools that browse the social graph by building them, and I’ll learn how to use Facebook by using it.

This new group is not meant to conflict with Marc Canter’s related DataSharingSummit. I’m a member of that group and plan on attending in September. That is focused on planning a specific event. What I’d like to see in the group I just created is a place where I can ask anyone else if they have found a way around Twitter’s funky feeds, for example.

We released the Grazr Widget as a Facebook app today. All the features work exactly as they do on regular web pages, including GrazrScript, so you can use this app to create custom searches, view YouTube videos, and play podcasts from within your Facebook profile. You can also share the app with your friends. When they view it in your profile, they are able to click a link to add it to their own profile as well.

You can visit the Grazr Feed Reader page in the Facebook Application directory, and from there you can add the app with a default OPML file. Navigating within the directory can be confusing, so if this link doesn’t work, you can search in the directory for “Grazr”. We chose the Share Your OPML top 100 list as our default, since that list of feeds should be of interest to the largest group of people. We also default to 3 pane view and the Gloss Silver theme. Once the app is on your profile, you can enter a new feed or OPML URL into the address bar.

The other way to add the app to Facebook is to go to the Grazr.com site, and use the normal widget install methods. You can open the Create a Widget page, and enter the URL of any feed or OPML file. You can then modify any of the display options, such as adding a theme. When you choose to save the results, you will be given the option to use Facebook as the destination. We have also added a Facebook badge to every Read page on the site. Clicking this badge will create a Facebook app for the current file.

This is our first experience with building a Facebook app, so we chose to duplicate the same functionality as our existing widget. The next step will be to watch how people use this app, and listen to their wish list. We have lots of ideas for how the Grazr Feed Reader can harness the power of the Facebook API to build some really cool tools. Please let us know what you’d like to see us add.

Within Facebook we have named the widget the Grazr Feed Reader. We felt this was necessary, because all Facebook apps are technically widgets, so calling it a widget seemed redundant. The new name also reflects the future direction of Grazr in general. We wanted to establish this position early in our relationship with Facebook users. Full feed reader functionality within this app is our goal before too long.

Our new weekly release program is running at a 100% success rate. Actually, we got 3 features out instead of the promised 2, so it must be 150%. I’ll describe each improvement in detail in later posts, but the summary is:

Facebook App. You can now install any Grazr widget within your Facebook profile. This can be done from the Facebook application directory, or directly from any Read page on the Grazr.com site.

Enhancement to the Anchor argument. The Anc argument we added last week allows you to automatically select any node as the starting point when the widget loads. Now you can select the node, but not load the associated page or feed. I’ll provide an example in the post that goes into the details.

Grazr:linktarget attribute for individual nodes. This will let you direct the target of link nodes, or feed items into different target browser windows or iframes.  

Our goals for next week are a text editor integrated into the site for editing hosted OPML files, and a new section of the website that will list Grazr and OPML related tools.

Something strange is showing up in our internal stats. The traffic on our website is going up, and the number of pages that display the widget is going up, but over the last few weeks the number of times the widget is loaded on other people’s pages is going down. The number of unique users loading the widget is also going down. Widget loads and unique users are surrogates for overall traffic in the blogosphere. They track how many times other people’s pages are loaded. If they are going down, then traffic on a wide range of Web pages is going down. It could just be a seasonal phenomenon, but it could also be the result of Facebook pulling people away from their traditional traffic patterns. Once we launch our Facebook app we’ll have a surrogate for Facebook traffic. Then we can see if it goes up while the rest of the blogosphere goes down. The Web never seemed zero-sum before. Maybe that will change.

This is my mantra as we work on our first pass at a Facebook version of the widget.