API is the new Site Map Part 2
Thursday, January 4, 2007Isn't it funny how when you start thinking about something you start seeing it everywhere? After saying
If personal website owners published their own recommendation feeds, then my software could merge the two data sets and help me make my decisions.
the very next day I read on Dave Winer's site:
It was made necessary because the two movie services I use the most, Yahoo and Netflix, won't share my ratings with each other. That's no good. So I'm going to start from scratch, and create an XML file that lists all the movies I've rated with both services.
Far out! It sounds like this sort of thing is on a lot of minds:
Firefox 3 would automagically transfer any (microformatted) events data I come across while browsing, into my 30Boxes account. And it could likewise put all my contacts into Gmail, locations into Yahoo Maps, phone numbers into Skype, etc.
While many applications support importing information, not all of them support feeds of information. For instance, even though geocasting is a cool idea, I don't know of a single mapping application that currently supports RSS with a payload of geos.
Edgeio allows you to publish your classified listings on your own site and they will subscribe to it, adding it to their own database, and keep it up to date.
Dave Winer mentions silos above and it seems we're always overcoming silos - possibly heading for some sort of information nirvana where we have both infinitely broad and infinitely narrow vision whenever we desire it. First the PC was a silo, then the network came and software was the silo, then the Internet came and now websites are the silos.
And the best thing is that people own their feeds and their content. People don't have to abdicate the ownership of their content just to participate as they do now.
RSS is the shining example of what could be in the near future. A social network will not be a website you to which you have to signup and commit , but simply participation by the publication of your own data, from your own location, the sum of which becomes the social network. The tools with which you participate, the creation tools, the aggregation tools, are up to you! Nobody owns this social network it just exists through aggregation. We have the technology today!
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