We just launched the first version of a new service this evening that we’re very excited about. The service allows users of the photo sharing site Flickr to splice their public photos into another feed (like a blog feed). The announcement about our partnership can be found here.Many of our publishers have expressed the desire to be able to use different publishing tools for different purposes (eg, a blogging tool, a bookmarks tool, a photo sharing tool, etc.) but still have one resulting feed that friends, family, and subscribers could access. Tonight’s announcement is a fun step in this direction.
I talked about adding this functionality — feed splicing — into Drupal. Just like you can add a home page or other URL to your user profile today, in the future you should be able to also add a URL pointing to any feed that is you, and Drupal will aggregate it for you.
This is already possible today through Drupal’s aggregation capabilities, but I want to take it to the next level, doing personal aggregation for every member account in a community. Richard is doing this for his many weblogs using Magpie, and the effect is good — especially when he can do things like post to Urban Vancouver but then still have the item show up on "his" site.
Congrats, Flickr-ites. And yes, of course I’m trying it out. I had recently switched the "visible" feeds here to use Feedburner (although I’m not redirecting the existing Drupal URLs at this point). But I don’t think my Flickr pictures mesh well with the business nature of this site. Herewith the Feedburner feed of my personal site.
Side note: this breaks Technorati. I’ve never believed in them as a long term play in any case. It’s interesting to see how many sites rely on instant spidering of updated feeds.
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