Streamified Blog

The Future of Social Reading is NOT another Reader

In the wake of the Google Reader shutdown, many people in the social spheres are wondering what is going to rise up to fill the gaps. Many have pointed to Feedly or other news reading apps. Lifehacker even did a post about the 5 best Google Reader replacements. 

In the tech realm, though, many are discussing the format known as “RSS” itself. This is the method by which bloggers and content creators have been able to “syndicate” their content for over a decade now. Fundamentally, each of the reader apps above are just tapping in to these RSS feeds.

However, RSS is archaic. It’s too hard for users to go about adding RSS feeds themselves; the vast majority of computer users don’t even know what a RSS feed is. On the other hand, replacing RSS with a new format/tool would be difficult. The format is far too well-embedded into the web ecosystem to go away any time soon. You’d need to convince literally millions of website owners to switch over to something new.

The solution is neither a new format, nor a new reader. We can’t plaster over the major shortcomings of RSS with a mere pretty UI/UX. A good start towards fixing the problem would be an API similar to the backend behind Google Reader, complete with full articles and rich media in a portable format (read: not embedded HTML). Of course, we can’t start from scratch: such an API would need millions of articles already in the system, and more added each day. What we need is a social-aware infrastructure (integrating not just with existing news feeds, but social networks and sharing features as well) that combines all these disparate sources.

We’ve been building exactly this API for the last 18 months, and it is already being used by our corporate partners. We’ve used EC2, RightScale, and node.js for maximum scalability, and it every day it handles millions of feed items. Today, we’ve officially released the Streamified API to the general public, and you can start using it for free.

The Streamified API does a huge amount of leg work to combine existing RSS feeds alongside a user’s social streams.

• It presents the posts in a way which is predictable and “normalized.”
• Each post is a full news article, instead of tiny summaries, snippets etc.
• Media is delivered in a way that makes sense: images, videos, etc. are each JSON objects, rather than HTML strings embedded  within the text.
• Every post contains categories, tags, sentiment, language, and other useful metadata.
• All this data is searchable, thanks to ElasticSearch on the backend.

This puts the power in the hands of the developers to create a UI that makes sense, rather than hoping that the RSS feed provides a pretty bit of HTML. You could just as easily make a native mobile app which looks great on a tiny screen as you could build a web app. You could choose to integrate social features, or you could leave them out. It’s all there.

In other words, it is a system which takes the entire social web (news and social networks) and combines them into something that can be accessed and manipulated with a minimal amount of effort.

Instead of dozens of social networks and millions of nonconforming RSS feeds, there is just one Streamified.

There is a 1,000 request/day courtesy limit for all new applications in the API. Developers can contact us to discuss increasing it, but for obvious reasons we can’t release a completely unlimited API.

This editorial is by Zane Claes, the founder of Streamified. He can be reached via Twitter @inZania. If you liked it, your shares are much appreciated (the share button is to the lower-right).