The “Feed Space” just got a little more interesting. Bloglines announced (offical PR, Mark’s blog entry) a new set of web services (using R E S T and R S S 2.0 / O P M L) for accessing some of services.
One of problems they hope to solve (or reduce) with this is feed scaling. I’m not sure that everyone will buy into that though. Although it can cause scaling problems, the nice thing about having decentralized feeds is that if one of them goes down it is no big deal. If everyone used Bloglines to access the feeds they follow and they went down then you loose access to all of your feeds. Perhaps Bloglines will become the Google of the feed space? Hey Mark, looking for a new FreeBSD/Database/PHP/(insert assorted other skills here) employee? 🙂
After I get a chance to read through their API documentation I’ll see what other ideas come up.
Update 10:15 am 28 Sep 04: To go along with Bloglines announcement there is an O’Reilly Network article by Marc Hedlund. In the article Marc describes the available services and an example Java app that makes use of new APIs.