These are my notes from the session Feeds as a Platform: More Data, Less Work by Niall Kennedy, Brent Simmons and Jane Kim.

Niall Kennedy started of by talking about implementations of subscriptions and syndication feeds from the early days of the Web such as PointCast, Netscape NetCenter's Inbox Direct feature and Backweb. That was back in 1997. Today in 2006, there are dozens of applications for subscribing and consuming syndication feeds. Niall then broke feed readers up into four main categories; desktop, online, media center and mobile. Desktop RSS readers are usually text-centric and follow the 3-pane mail/news reader model. Consuming rich media from feeds (i.e. podcasts) is often not handed off to other applications instead of being an integrated part of the experience. Finally, a problem with desktop feed readers is that one cannot access their feeds from anywhere and at anytime. Online feed readers offer a number of advantages over desktop feed readers. An online reader is accessible from any computer so there is no problem of having to keep ones feeds in sync across multiple machines. Feeds are polled without the user needing to have an application constantly running as is the case with desktop readers. And the feed search capabilities are often more powerful since they can search feeds the user isn't subscribed to. Feed readers that are built into Media Centers enable people to consume niche content that may not be available from mainstream sources. Media Center feed readers can take advantage of the users playlists, recommendations/preferences and the time-shifting capabilities of the Media Center to provide a consistent and rich experience whether consuming niche content from the Web or mainstream content from regular television. Mobile readers tend to enable scenarios where the user needs to consume content quickly since users either ewant highly targetted information or just a quick distraction when consuming mobile content. Niall then gave examples of various kinds of feed readers such as iTunes which does audio and video podcasts, FireAnt which does video podcasts, and Screen3 which is a feed reader for mobile phones.

The talk then focused on some of the issues facing the ecosystem of feed providers and readers

• too many readers hitting feed providers
• payloads to feeds getting bigger due to enclosures
• users suffering from information overload due to too many feeds
• subscription and discovery are complicated
• multiple feed formats
• XML is often invalid - Google Reader team blogged that 15% of feeds ae invalid
• roaming subscriptions between PCs when using a desktop reader

There are also developer specific issues such as handling multiple formats, namespaced extension elements, searching feeds, synchronization and ensuring one follows HTTP best practices that benefit when there exists a platform that already does the heavy lifting. Companies such as Google, NewsGator and Microsoft provide different platforms for processing feeds which can be used to either enhance existing feed readers or build new ones.

Jane Kim then took over the session to talk about the Windows RSS platform and how it is used by Internet Explorer 7. She began by explaining that one of the complelling things about Web feeds is that the syndicated information doesn't have to be limited to text. Thanks to the power of enclosures one can subscribe to calendars, contact lists, video and audio podcasts. For this reason the Internet Explorer team believes that consuming feeds goes beyond the browser which is one of the reasons they decided to build the Windows RSS platform. The integration of feed consumption in Internet Explorer is primarily geared at enabling novice users to easily discover, subscribe and read content from feeds. The Windows RSS platform consists of 3 core pieces that can be used by developers

• Common Feed List - list of feeds the user has subscribed to
• Download Engine - this manages downloading of feeds and enclosures
• Centralized Feed Store - this is where the downloaded feeds and enclosures are stored on disk. All feed formats are normalized to a custom amalgam of RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0.

By offering these centralized services it is hoped that this will lead to more sharing between feed reading applications instead of the current practice where information about a user's subscriptions are siloed within each feed reading application they use.

Jane then completed here talk by showing some demos. She showed subscribing to a Yahoo! News feed in Internet Explorer 7. She also showed some integration with the Windows RSS platform that is forthcoming in the next version of Feed Demon and the desktop gadgets in Windows Vista.

Niall Kennedy followed up by talking about the currently undocumented Google Reader API. The Google Reader team built an API which allows them to build multiple user interfaces for viewing a reader's subscription. The current view called 'lens' is just one of many views they have in development. One side effect of having this API is that third party developers could also build desktop or web-based feed readers on top of the Google Reader API. The API normalizes all feeds to Atom 1.0 [which causes some data loss] and provides mechanisms for tagging feeds, flagging items, marking items read/unread, searching the user's feeds and ranking/rating of items.

Brent Simmons took over at this point to talk about the NewsGator API . Brent was standing in for Greg Reinacker who couldn't make it to ETech but will be at MIX '06 to talk about some of the new things they are working on. Soon after Brent started working on NetNewsWire he began to get demands from users for building a solution that enabled them use NetNewsWire from multiple computers but keep the information in sync. He came up with a solution which involved being able to upload/download the state of a NetNewsWire instance to an FTP server which could then be used to synchronize another instance of NewNewsWire. This is the same solution I originally settled on for RSS Bandit.

After a while, Brent's customers started making more demands for synchronizing between feed readers on other platforms such as Windows or mobile phones and he realized that his solution couldn't meet those needs. He looked around at some options before settling on the NewsGator API. The Bloglines Sync API didn't work for synchronization since it is mainly a read-only API for fetching unread items from Bloglines. However it is complicated by the fact that fetching unread items from Bloglines marks them as read even if you don't read them in retrieving applications. So basically it sucks a lot. He also looked at the Apple .Mac Sync but that is limited to only the Mac platform.

The NewsGator API met all of Brent's needs by

• uses standard protocols (SOAP) which can be consumed from any platform
• using incremental synchronization [only downloading changes instead of entire application state] which improves bandwidth utilization
• supports granular operations [add feed, mark item read, rename feed, etc]

Brent finished his talk by giving a demo of syncing NetNewsWire with the NewsGator Online Edition.