Feed Mashups and Personalization

Sudhir Tonse and Alberto Cobas

AOL

Making it Personal

Problem: Too many web sites - hard to remember

Solution: Build the best possible "personal dashboard"- your jumping off point for the web.

Problem: Too little time

Solution: Innovate around automation - find me things I like or want without me having to do the work

Blogs and Reviews

TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/10/aol-launches-three-new-myaol-products-into-beta
Jeremy O's Web Strategist blog: http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/06/25/a-tour-of-myaol/
Washington Post: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/washbizblog/2007/07/aol_introduces_myaol.html

Mgnet Screenshot

Magnet

myAOL/Magnet Demo

Demo of myAOL/Magnet..

Magnet - a Personalized Mashup

Magnet is a Mashup of 1000s of feeds
Everything is an Atom Feed
It "learns" what you like (and dislike)
It lets you Navigate the Web using the Image Cloud Metaphor
Also lets you navigate by "Searching" for what you like

myAOL/Magnet Demo

Demo of Mgnet in an iPhone

Building Mashups - And Future Challenges

"Socializing" whats essentially personal

OpenAuth/OpenID?
URL Obfuscation?, Token based Scheme?

RSS/Atom/Publishing

RSS v/s Atom? Atom Schemas?
TTL, If-Mod?

Favorites - Feed & Bookmark Central

Read and manage all your feeds and bookmarks in one place

Directly access Mgnet bookmarks and MyPage feeds

Mix & Share: "one-click" feed mashup creation
Import feeds from other readers via OPML (you can also export ;-)
Generate code to let users easily add your feed to their Favorites without disrupting your site's experience
Supported by a set of APIs that will be available to the developer community soon

Favorites Screenshot

Favorites Demo

Favorites app:
http://beta.my.aol.com/
For webmasters:
http://beta.favorites.my.aol.com/webmaster/myAOLButton

Favorites APIs - Highlights

Manage user's bookmarks and feed subscriptions, organize by folders or tags
Retrieve feed articles (for single or multiple feeds)
Chain operations during feed processing: sort, trim, html
REST-style or RPC-style APIs
Formats supported:

JSON/JSONP (great for cross-domain apps!)
XML: native, OPML, ATOM, RSS (native clients, feed readers, etc.)
HTML

Easy feed mashups

Using Favorites, create your own Mix & Share feed, then use the URL in your app
- Directly: http://beta.favorites.my.aol.com/efavs/public/sl:mashupcamp2/a2.34.6
- Cross-domain parsing: Add ?format=json&callback=myCallbackName
Directly create a Mix & Share feed from a folder or tag using APIs (can even mix feed articles and bookmarks)
Generate a synthetic feed from several feeds on the fly using a single API call

Feed mashup example

Request:

http://server.domain/api/GetFeed.do?url=
["http://slashdot.org/rss/index.rss",
"http://feeds.engadget.com/weblogsinc/engadget"]&
modules=sort&sort.by=date&sort.order=desc&
format=atom-json&callback=processResponse

Fetch slashdot and engadget, combine them into one synthetic feed, sort the synthetic feed entries by descending date, convert the feed to atom-json, return as callback argument

Feed mashup example

Response:

processResponse({"response":{"statusCode":200, ...,"data":{
 "feed":{
  "xmlns:sy":"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/",
  "title":"","entry":[
   {"summary":{"type":"html","content":"..."},
    "title":"Sony announces PSP 1seg TV tuner",
    "published":"2007-07-17T19:07:00Z",
    "dc:creator":"Donald Melanson","category":[{"term":"..."},...],
    "link": {"href":"http://feeds.engadget.com/...","rel":"..."},
    "dc:date":"2007-07-17T19:07:00Z", ...
   },
   {"summary":{"type":"html","content": ...},
   ...
  ]
 }}}})