RSS, OPML and the XML platform.
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Dave Sifry has announced that he resigned as CEO of Technorati and Technorati has laid-off 8 employees. As predicted, the Web 2.0 fallout has begun. This is definitely a bad sign for Technorati. It's likely they aren't near profitability, the cash is crunching and they are finding it increasingly more difficult to find more.
http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000508.html
Around the blogosphere.
The web-based RSS reader Bloglines now offers a mobile version of its service optimized for Apple iPhone. You can read full-text feeds, search for feeds and specific text across all feeds, and turn on Skweezer, a service that makes web pages more...
Dan Catt announced that Flickr has better support for GeoRSS. From what I gather, you previously had to ask for the GeoRSS info with an additional query parameter, but it's now included with each photo. But I'm unsure if this is in addition to other geo information available in the feed. Here's a sample XML fragment from an RSS <item>.
<georss:point>22.876807 -109.898128</georss:point>
<geo:point>
<geo:lat>22.876807</geo:lat>
<geo:long>-109.898128</geo:long>
</geo:point>
Note that the GeoRSS information is redundant and somewhat harder to parse. That's not a good first impression of GeoRSS. IMHO.
Facebook has continued to produce more APIs for their facebook playform. This time, they've produce a data store API. This API allows someone writing a facebook application to store data on the facebook servers.
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Data_Store_API_documentation
This looks like more lock-in to me. I can't understand why someone would write a proprietary application for a someone elses platform. Now facebook wants you to store your data on their servers. Ya, it's cool to write a facebook application, but its not a long-term model for success.
Around the blogosphere...
Google has released a very interesting set of APIs called Google Docs Data APIs. The APIs allow you to manage your Google Docs and update spreadsheets. There's great potential here for collaborative applications. Spreadsheet sharing is a very comon task in many offices. The creation and distribution of these spreadsheets can now be accomplished by rather simple scheduled tasks.
Last week, I reported that Google was putting microformat hCards in Google Maps. This week, Kevin Marks is reporting microformat hAtom in Google's Blogger templates. I wonder if this is just two data points or if there exists a broader support for microformats at Google. Up to this point, microformats have not had much support from anyone, but if Google decided to push this technology, then I'm certain they could make it go.
http://epeus.blogspot.com/2007/08/microformats-in-blogger-hatom-support.html