Feedburner, inaugural winner of the R/WW Best Web LittleCo award in 2004 (current holder is 37Signals) has just released the final stage of their FeedFlare rollout. FeedFlare is a set of web services plug-ins. I wrote about it in December when they released stage 1 and at the time I called it “interactive RSS”.
In a nutshell, FeedFlare enables publishers to add a bit of ‘social context’ to their feed, with things like ‘Email this’, Technorati data, del.icio.us tags and more.
With the release of the API, Feedburner has invited external developers to create any third party plug-in to the Feedburner system. As they put it:
“The really big idea, however, was always the notion of providing a universal framework/API to enable any third-party web service to integrate with a publisher’s content, without concern over what content management system the publisher is using.”
Feedburner has come up with 101 ideas for external developers. The top 5 I want to see developed are (in no particular order):
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One thing I’d like to see added to the FeedFlare program is a central place where developers can submit their web services. I can see myself adding a number of these services to my feed and site, especially if they’re one of the above 5.