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Why I Won’t Be Integrating NetVibes (For Now)

It’s very simple.  The NetVibes feeds (here is one) do not contain very important information in them including:

  1. Author
  2. Source (name and link)
  3. Tags
  4. Full content

Unless ReadBurner has some super secret backdoor feed that I don’t know about yet; I’m holding off.  RSSmeme is 100% ready (with the flip of a switch) to pull in NetVibes data.  I’ve had the code ready for a little while now.  But I care about the meta data.  Without that extra data the API becomes useless.

While we are on the topic of meta data I’d like to mention that all of the feeds that RSSmeme produces contain the original author and tag information inside of each entry.  This is something that ReadBurner is still lacking (compare the RSS feeds we each generate to see the difference).  Giving back data is as important as aggregating it in my opinion.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • tariq krim
    a full documented api is coming soon
  • Hi Benjamin,
    thanks a lot for your feedback. Actually today we don't have in our feeds all the infos you're asking:
    1/ Since in Netvibes you can share different items (widget content, urls, ...) and not only rss feeds the "author" is not always possible to have. That's why we removed it
    2/ We have the source and the direct link to the ressource
    3/ Our users don't tag content but have the ability to write comments which are included in the feed
    4/ Here I don't agree with you... Why should we use full content under the netvibes.com domain in the feeds while the content doesn't belong to us?

    I'd love to discuss more with you about about meta data and how to improve the APIs. You have my email, don't hesitate to contact me.
  • 1) Can you give us the author when it is available?
    2) By source I don't mean the link. In Google Reader if you share a story on techcrunch not only does it give you the link to the actual story but the title "TechCrunch" and a link to http://www.techcrunch.com/
    3) I don't mean users tags. Google Reader takes any tags that were in the original feed (ie any tags that TechCrunch put in) and passes it on to into the entries in the shared RSS feed.
    4) I understand this is a heated debate.
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