Microfeed could be to status updates what Telepathy is to instant messaging

cover image for Microfeed could be to status updates what Telepathy is to instant messaging

Microfeed is a new D-Bus service for handling status updating and microblogging entries from various services. Just like Telepathy allows various applications to utilize instant messaging connections, Microfeed does the same for microblogging:

Microfeed is a specification and a reference implementation of client-server architecture providing access to various information sources that have a feed-type interface. Examples of those feed sources include micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Qaiku, and Laconi.ca. By utilizing Microfeed architecture, a client application can focus on user interface, while the actual feed fetching is done in the background independently. The communication between a local Microfeed server publishing information about feeds and a client application displaying that information to an user is done with the D-Bus messaging following the publisher-subscriber principle.

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Microfeed service already is the power behind Henrik Hedberg's new Mauku microblogging interface for Maemo 5. Here you can see a stream of updates from both Qaiku and Twitter:

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If you're implementing a tool that deals with microblogging services, please consider using microfeed for it. Advantages from this include:

  • User accounts to various services need to be entered only once and can be reused
  • You don't need to concern yourself with the particular features or quirks of a microblogging service API, just use the D-Bus interfaces provided by Microfeed
  • Twitter? Qaiku? StatusNet? Facebook? You can let your users choose what services they want to use, without overhead of having to implement the protocols for each of them

More information from http://microfeed.org/