We have all heard of flair, whether if be via the movie Office Space or the actual emergency flares you use when you are in distresss. Today, flare has a new meaning since FeedBurner announced a new web services product called FeedFlare. The FeedBurner blog Burning Questions discusses FeedFlare here.
What is FeedFlare? It is a set of web services that allow interoperability between a feed item and the web. Basically, it allows you to place additional real-time information into an exisiting feed item. According to the the FeedBurner blog the new option will allow feeds to carry the following seven tidbits of information:
- most popular tags for this item via del.icio.us
- tag this item at del.icio.us
- Technorati cosmos: number of links to this post
- Creative Commons license for this specific item. This works even if you are splicing, say, a Flickery photo feed into a blog feed and the two parent feeds have different licenses associated with them.
- number of comments on this post (currently only for feeds created by Word press)
- email this item
- email the author of this item (particularly helpful if the item ends up spliced into another feed or re purposed on a site).
Additionally, FeedBurner has announced that it will be opening up its API to allow for others to add features to this new web services product. The sky is the limit for the amount of interactivity a feed could now carry. I have added these new features to my FeedBurner feed and hope that
they add additional value to you as shown in the image to the right.
For more of the blogosphere buzz on the FeedBurner announcement checkout these posts on Tech Crunch, Read/Write Web, Niall Kennedy, Junto Boyz and Stowe Boyd.
