AIM Buddy Feed
Alan Keister (AOL’s Director of AIM Development) showed me AIM Buddy Feed today. Basically, it is an RSS feed “aggregator”.
What is an RSS feed?
So imagine you have stuff on the web like your family pictures and you would like to give friends a URL to a “webpage” that they can visit to see the latest picture (or whatever) that you have uploaded to your FLICKR page. Well RSS feeds make seeing “what’s new” easier. Firefox and other “RSS Readers” make this easy in their UI as simple reader applications. But even desktop apps are getting into the game. iPhoto recently released a version to show a photo RSS feed right inside iPhoto as an album! (example for you Mac fans: photo://carlhutzler.com/feed/photocast.php)
What is an aggregator?
Imagine that I have several sites I use and each has an RSS feed capability. Maybe I have a Blog on BLOGGER and pictures on FLICKR. I might post a new picture and a new blog posting one day. Someone might have the RSS feed for my FLICKR site but not my blog so they would miss my words of wisdom if they only had my FLICKR feed. By using an aggregator of RSS feeds I could just tell people about “all things me” by giving them the aggregator feed URL. They could subscribe to that URL once and see everything that is Carl Hutzler (ewww, fascinating ;-). And one better, if I decided to start posting videos on YouTube some day, I could add that into my aggregated feed and everyone would just start seeing my video stuff too, as they are subscribed to the “aggregated carl hutzler feed” (all things Carl :-)
So what did the AIM guys do to make this even better?
1. They make it easy to include feeds from non-AOL sites like FLICKR, BLOGGER, MySpace, etc., in addition to your own custom feeds.
2. Within AIM Pages and the AIM Triton client they provide a neat little icon next to your buddy’s name to note if they have any new content for you to see. This is very nice integration into a desktop application (like iPhoto example above) and helps keep you up-to-date on everything your buddies are doing online.
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So is that Website closed to the public? I keep getting cannot find server for that and Aim Widgets.
Mike - you are right in that the AIM Buddy Feed is not yet open to the public! And I am sorry I did not realize this before posting to my blog. I guess it is internal AOL employees only for the moment. I will find out when it will be open to everyone. It is still cool :-)
I believe the site is now open for everyone. Sorry about any confusion.
Still seems to be down to the public. The thing is that they put a link to it in everyones buddy updates a bit too early. I figured out how to get the buddy update RSS feed though.
nevermind, i got it working, they just need to redirect buddyupdates.aim.com to buddyupdates.aim.com/settings otherwise people will see a 404 page.