FeedBurner Integrates Web Services Into Feeds

FeedBurner is launching FeedFlare tonight – a group of web services that can be integrated by the publisher into her/his feed. FeedFlare is located under the “Optimize” tab within the FeedBurner dashboard.

FeedBurner is also releasing a full set of open APIs to allow third party developers to build and integrate customized services.

Give your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including as many or few of the services listed below. FeedFlare places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item in your feed, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around your content.

If a publisher chooses to include one or more services, they appear at the bottom of the feed. Currently offered services include:

  • Email this – Send a link to your item to someone via email.
  • Email author – Allow subscribers to email you directly.
  • Technorati Cosmos – Display the number of links to your item from blogs, as measured by Technorati.
  • Del.icio.us tags – Lists del.icio.us tags for an item.
  • Save to del.icio.us – Allows subscribers to bookmark the item with del.icio.us.
  • Count comments – Lists the number of comments posted to an item (for WordPress blogs only).
  • Creative Commons – Displays the Creative Commons license that you may have applied to your feed or post.

I’ve added a number of these to the TechCrunch feed. Just look to the bottom of any post, within the feed or in a feed reader.

The really interesting part of this announcement, however, is that FeedBurner is opening up the API and allowing anyone to build in their own services. Del.icio.us competitors, for example, can build their own version of this and promote it to publishers. Or entirely different types of applications can be built. I like having interactive services like these being built directly into the feed. Richard MacManus has more.