Red hot lifestreaming service FriendFeed announced this afternoon that the company has hired Benjamin Golub, the creator of FriendFeedToGo, the mobile interface of choice for FF users.

More obviously relevant to FriendFeed is Golub's project FFToGo.com, which this author uses throughout the day every day. The app does a great job making the native javascript-heavy interface for FriendFeed usable on a mobile phone.

The guy knows how to parse and make usable streams of data that are flying around from user activity. He should fit in very well there.

If you'd like to meet up with ReadWriteWeb staff on FriendFeed, see our profiles there and the RWW Room.

Photo of Golub by Megen Vo.

Can The Fire Still Burn?

We're excited to see what Golub does at FriendFeed, though his distinct work will likely be harder to discern than it was when he was an outsider. When Marco Kaiser, creator of the very popular Twitter interface Twhirl, was the subject of a hire/acquire by video chat service Seesmic in April - we said the coming together offered a vision of the future of the web. That may be, but Twhirl releases feel different now and the app is being replaced on the desktops of many early adopters by the insurgent Tweetdeck.

What will happen to these fireball projects once they are brought into the fold? We hope that at least some of the fire will still burn, but at the very least it's evident that offering and building on an API are good ways to find good developers from around the world and a good way to get a job if you are a very good developer.

RSSmeme's backend was completely overhauled, resulting in the creation of an API: http://www.rssmeme.com/api/help/. The API now allows you to do all kinds of things with RSSmeme, like create custom feeds, import notes, and create widgets. It even allowed for the creation of an RSSmeme mobile site. Here's some more detail on each of these updates including how you can put them to use for yourself:

Create Custom Feeds

By using the API you can now get feeds for any type of filter - for example, an "English-only" feed: http://www.rssmeme.com/?output=atom&language=en. You can also use the API to create very specific custom feeds, like this feed for ReadWriteWeb stories with at least 10 shares sorted by the date published: http://www.rssmeme.com/api/?order_by=-pub_date&source=8&feeds_gte=10&output=atom.

The trick to creating these custom feeds is using specific parameters in the URL. Each URL should begin http://www.rssmeme.com/? followed by whichever parameters you want to use. There are several different parameters available, including the following:

• output - the output format. Choices are 'html', 'json', 'xml', or 'atom'. If you want a feed to put in Google Reader choose 'atom'. If you are looking to build something out of the API then choose 'json', which serves the most data including notes.
• author - the id of an author.
• hours - the number of hours since a story was published.
• entry - the id of an entry.
• feed - the id of a feed. To find your feed id, put your Google Reader shared RSS feed link into the Register form which will redirect you to your feed.
• feeds_gte - the minimum number of times an entry must be shared.
• feeds_lte - the maximum number of times an entry must be shared.
• friendfeed - the nickname of a user on Friendfeed. This will limit the entries to only those that were shared by friends of this user.
• language - the language code ('en') of an entry.
• order_by - how the data should be ordered. Acceptable values are 'pub_date', '-pub_date', 'feed_count', or '-feed_count'.
• page - the page of data you are requesting. Every page is a maximum of 20 entries long.
• search - a search term on an entry's title.
• source - the id of a source - to find this, do a search for the source blog on RSSmeme. Hover over the link for the blog underneath the shared item's title where it says "by author on name of blog" You'll see the source in the URL of the blog. For example, ReadWriteWeb is "8."
• tag - the slug of a tag ('google' for instance).
• url - a specific URL you are looking for. This is very useful if you want to pull information out of RSSmeme for based on a URL.

Wordpress Widgets & Plugins

With the RSSmeme API, you can now create Wordpress widgets or plugins that show your shared items, your blog's top shared stories, or, by using the URL filter, you could even create a plugin that pulls the notes from RSSmeme into your blog. That last one would be especially helpful to publishers concerned with conversation fragmentation. Golub has posted some steps to get a Wordpress developer started with how to use the JSON API to begin building the plugin.

However, even if you're not a developer, you can still use RSSmeme to easily create a blog widget for your site. For example, Golub posts about how to create a "most shared stories" widget here which lets you generate a simple list of your most shared stories, just by doing the following:

1. Find your source id.  The best way to do this is to use the RSSmeme search to fine one of your stories titles. (see the "source" parameter in the list above).
2. Build your URL.  The format is http://www.rssmeme.com/api/?output=atom&order_by=-feed_count&source=number. Replace number with your blog's source id. This particular URL will give you a feed ordered by the amount of shares for your blog.
3. Create a RSS widget in your blog.  (See these Wordpress instructions - just put the URL you generated in step 2 in the widget.)

Track Who Is Writing Notes About Your Blog Posts

Since RSSmeme now pulls in Google Reader notes, you can use the site to see who is writing notes about your blog posts. All you need to do is specify your blog ID using the following format:

For example, ReadWriteWeb is http://www.rssmeme.com/source/8.

Get a Personalized RSSmeme via FriendFeed Filtering

Instead of using a Greasemonkey script to filter FriendFeed for Google Reader shares, you could instead, view all your FriendFeed friends' shared items on RSSmeme by going to this URL instead: http://www.rssmeme.com/friendfeed/. On that page, enter in your FriendFeed username and click "go" to see all the items shared by your friends. And, just like anything on RSSmeme, you can subscribe to a feed of the search results.

Mobile RSSmeme

The new RSSmeme API also allowed Golub to create a mobile version of RSSmeme in 30 minutes and 50 lines of code. The mobile site takes the English front page of RSSmeme and makes it mobile: http://m.rssmeme.com/.  The code to the mobile RSSmeme is posted here.

Conclusion

In addition to these recent updates, RSSmeme still offers several different filtering options, like choosing to see stories from a specified time frame (X number of "hours ago") with a certain number of shares. You can flip between "Popular" stories and "Recent" ones, like you can on ReadBurner (Popular/Upcoming), but unlike ReadBurner, RSSmeme also offers a search box to help you find stories and RSSmeme users. Most importantly, you can subscribe the feed for any search done on the site.

If the future of social media is filtering, like Corvida recently mentioned, then providing these types of tools is a big step in the right direction for RSSmeme.

The first thing you may notice when visiting the new ReadBurner web site is its new interface, designed by Gary Bacon of PixelTalent. Although they kept the same color scheme of blue and orange, the new site is brighter, and, as they said on their blog (where you can also view before and afters), it's "shinier", too.

Categories & Stats

The old site had categories at the top that included "Popular," "Upcoming," "Most Recent," "Popular this Week," and "Popular All time,", but the new site is aiming to be less cluttered. This version of ReadBurner is sticking to just "Popular," "Upcoming," and "Most Recent."

Beneath these main categories, stories are also analyzed and sorted into sub-categories, each with their own RSS feed. Currently, these sub-categories include "Web," "Desktop," "Mobile," and "Apple," as well as "All," which will revert you to seeing all the shared items in whichever main category you are viewing.

ReadBurner

For viewing items that have been popular over the past week, there is a box on the right called "Popular This Week." Above the box, you'll notice a link to the "Stats" page, which is sort of like a cross between AllTop and the Techmeme Leaderboard, but focused on sharing data. Also on this page are the top 50 sources for shares.

This Week's Popular Items

Changes to the Shared Items

A feature called "Related Items" groups similar stories together, displaying the related content both on the main page as well as on the individual story's page itself, something which can be accessed by clicking on the button displaying the number of shares for that story.

What's even more exciting is that ReadBurner is working on a way to allow comments on the feeds without removing that conversation from the blogosphere, a hot button issue as of late. To do so, ReadBurner is working with Disqus, a new blog commenting system that many people are using on their blogs today. While the feature is not fully live yet, they are hoping to post ReadBurner comments on the originating source (the blog), in addition to their site. They believe this feature will be functional within a few weeks, but that will depend on Disqus. Although non-Disqus enabled blogs won't benefit, it's a good first step to limiting the conversation fragmentation issues while also adding a feature many have wanted.

The Disqus integration will also be tweaked in the future so that all related stories will share one set of comments - an interesting plan which will make blog reading and commenting a more conversational and intertwined experience.

Google Reader Integration

To make ReadBurner even more useful, they've integrated Google Reader within the web site. By clicking on the Google Reader tab, your Google Reader will appear right in the ReadBurner interface, something which makes feed reading and sharing even more enjoyable than before.

Other New Features

Another useful feature is ReadBurner's descriptive URLs. This allows you to view all the shared items by a particular author or a favorite sources from one easy-to-remember URL. For example, all stories from Read Write Web can be viewed at readburner.com/source/readwriteweb. To view stories by a particular author, the format is readburner.com/author/author. For example, all stories by Marshall are available at readburner.com/author/Marshall+Kirkpatrick.

Future Plans

Besides getting the Disqus integration perfected, the ReadBurner team will also be working on continually improving their algorithm as well as offering new ways for developers to utilize their data.

For users, the focus will be on data portability - that is, letting users take their ReadBurner data with them to other services (perhaps FriendFeed, we hope?) Additionally, users will be able to share more information about themselves, something that points to, perhaps, the creation of user profiles on the site.

Where Does This Leave RSSMeme?

ReadBurner's launch and extensive features list definitely brings some new competition to the other Google Reader Shared Items aggregator, RSSMeme. However, that site, which served us well in ReadBurner's absence, does offer one big feature that ReadBurner currently lacks: search. The search box on RSSMeme lets you search both stories and users, and seems a critical omission from the new ReadBurner.

RSSMeme also allows you to click "Read More of this Story," which expands the selection to show you more of the blog post while staying on the RSSMeme web site. A similar feature on ReadBurner actually takes you to the blog's web site instead. While this may not be a favorite feature for ReadBurner users, the bloggers who rely on pageviews will be sure to appreciate it.

Like ReadBurner, RSSMeme also gathers similar stories which can be accessed by a link from the main item. As far as whose algorithm for related items is better, only time will tell, but this could be a real source of competition between the two very similar sites. Another point of contention will certainly involve the speed of each site's algorithm in calculating the number of shares from Google Reader.

RSSMeme offers commenting via Disqus and, for its users, although it does not push comments back to the blogs like ReadBurner plans to do. RSSMeme also has a blog widget which shows the number of shares for each post, a small feature that many bloggers currently enjoy using.

Get Involved

If your Google Reader Shared Items feed was previously registered with the old ReadBurner, you don't need to add it again. They've also included the feeds of the people that requested to be added from the "Coming Soon" page that they had up for a while.

However, if you aren't sure, or if you never added your feed to begin with, you can easily do so from the "Add Feed" page.

We're very excited for ReadBurner's launch. It looks like they've done a good job overhauling the prior site while also offering many features that will offer RSSMeme some good competition. We're looking forward to what they will have in store for us in the future, too.