Superfeedr

Last updated
Superfeedr
Superfeedr.png
Headquarters San Francisco, California,
United States
Area servedWorldwide
Founder(s) Julien Genestoux
Key people Mark Cuban (investor) Betaworks (investor)
Industry Web application
Parent Notifixious, Inc.
URL superfeedr.com

Superfeedr is a feed API built on WebSub that is sometimes referred to as PuSH. It transforms a variety of feeds into a standardized RSS, Atom, or JSON format [1] and distributes "pushes" them via WebSub or XMPP. Feeds allow publishers to send notifications to subscribers when content is updated.

Contents

History

Superfeedr was launched in 2009 by parent company Notifixious [2] . While Notifixious' website went offline sometime between September 23, 2009 [3] and January 5, 2010 [4] and is no longer available. Superfeedr has remained online and available and continues to refer to Notifixious in the terms of service for the site. [5]

Superfeedr was bought by Medium in 2016. [6]

Technology

PuSH is a protocol that relies on webhooks to push feed updates in real-time from publishers to subscribers in a decentralized manner. PuSH builds on existing protocols,[ citation needed ] ensuring that polling infrastructures currently in use are not changed or broken on implementation, and that polling is still available as a back-up. Superfeedr acts as a “default” hub that works for an RSS or Atom feed, whether the publisher supports the protocol or not.

Superfeedr also built a feed graph to identify updates in related feeds to avoid polling feeds too aggressively. [7]

Features

Publishers are web applications that host their WebSub hub with Superfeedr, while subscribers are applications that consume the feed API to aggregate feeds from across the web. Trackers, a new type of user application that subscribes to search queries, was added to Superfeedr in April 2015. Complex queries can be tracked by including or excluding search terms, exact or inexact match queries, and by using language filters. The tracking feature (a prospective search engine) is scaled to parse millions of feeds and their metadata to add extra filtering options. [8]

Funding

In late 2009, Mark Cuban and Betaworks invested in Superfeedr during a round of seed funding. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RSS</span> Family of web feed formats

RSS is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitor sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them. News aggregators can be built into a browser, installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device.

In computing, the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface Standard provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. One can think of geographical features as the "source code" behind a map, whereas the WMS interface or online tiled mapping portals like Google Maps return only an image, which end-users cannot edit or spatially analyze. The XML-based GML furnishes the default payload-encoding for transporting geographic features, but other formats like shapefiles can also serve for transport. In early 2006 the OGC members approved the OpenGIS GML Simple Features Profile. This profile is designed both to increase interoperability between WFS servers and to improve the ease of implementation of the WFS standard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atom (web standard)</span> Web standards

The name Atom applies to a pair of related Web standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web feed</span> Data format

On the World Wide Web, a web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe a channel to it by adding the feed resource address to a news aggregator client. Users typically subscribe to a feed by manually entering the URL of a feed or clicking a link in a web browser or by dragging the link from the web browser to the aggregator, thus "RSS and Atom files provide news updates from a website in a simple form for your computer."

In software architecture, publish–subscribe is a messaging pattern where publishers categorize messages into classes that are received by subscribers. This is contrasted to the typical messaging pattern model where publishers send messages directly to subscribers.

Push technology, also known as server push, refers to a method of communication on the Internet where the initial request for a transaction is initiated by the server, rather than the client. This approach is different from the more commonly known "pull" method, where information transmission is requested by the receiver or client.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">News aggregator</span> Client software that aggregates syndicated web content

In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, RSS reader, or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates digital content such as online newspapers, blogs, podcasts, and video blogs (vlogs) in one location for easy viewing. The updates distributed may include journal tables of contents, podcasts, videos, and news items.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Reader</span> Defunct RSS/Atom feed aggregator formerly operated by Google

Google Reader is a discontinued RSS/Atom feed aggregator operated by Google. It was created in early 2005 by Google engineer Chris Wetherell and launched on October 7, 2005, through Google Labs. Google Reader grew in popularity to support a number of programs which used it as a platform for serving news and information to users. Google shut down Google Reader on July 1, 2013, citing declining use.

In blogging, a ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent from the weblog to one or more Ping servers, as specified by originating weblog), to notify a list of their "Services" of new content on the weblog.

FeedSync for Atom and RSS, previously Simple Sharing Extensions, are extensions to RSS and Atom feed formats designed to enable the bi-directional synchronization of information by using a variety of data sources. Initially developed by Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, it is now maintained by Jack Ozzie, George Moromisato, Matt Augustine, Paresh Suthar and Steven Lees. Dave Winer, the designer of the UserLand Software RSS specification variants, has given input for the specifications.

GData provides a simple protocol for reading and writing data on the Internet, designed by Google. GData combines common XML-based syndication formats with a feed-publishing system based on the Atom Publishing Protocol, plus some extensions for handling queries. It relies on XML or JSON as a data format.

Web syndication technologies were preceded by metadata standards such as the Meta Content Framework (MCF) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), as well as by 'push' specifications such as Channel Definition Format (CDF). Early web syndication standards included Information and Content Exchange (ICE) and RSS. More recent specifications include Atom and GData.

RSS tracking is a methodology for tracking RSS feeds.

Microsoft Sync Framework is a data synchronization platform from Microsoft that can be used to synchronize data across multiple data stores. Sync Framework includes a transport-agnostic architecture, into which data store-specific synchronization providers, modelled on the ADO.NET data provider API, can be plugged in. Sync Framework can be used for offline access to data, by working against a cached set of data and submitting the changes to a master database in a batch, as well as to synchronize changes to a data source across all consumers and peer-to-peer synchronization of multiple data sources. Sync Framework features built-in capabilities for conflict detection – whether data to be changed has already been updated – and can flag them for manual inspection or use defined policies to try to resolve the conflict. Sync Services includes an embedded SQL Server Compact database to store metadata about the synchronization relationships as well as about each sync attempt. The Sync Framework API is surfaced both in managed code, for use with .NET Framework applications, as well as unmanaged code, for use with COM applications. It was scheduled to ship with Visual Studio 2008 in late November 2007.

Pull coding or client pull is a style of network communication where the initial request for data originates from the client, and then is responded to by the server. The reverse is known as push technology, where the server pushes data to clients.

OAuth is an open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords. This mechanism is used by companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter to permit users to share information about their accounts with third-party applications or websites.

Simple Update Protocol, or SUP, is a protocol developed by FriendFeed to simplify and speed up RSS and Atom feed updates. Updates from services that supported the protocol would appear on FriendFeed within seconds, until support was dropped. These sites include Disqus, Identi.ca, reddit.

RSS Cloud is an optional sub-element of the RSS protocol's <channel> element that enables realtime (immediate) push notifications or distributed publish/subscribe communication for feeds. This is done using a <cloud> element allowing a software service to register with a cloud which notifies subscribers of updates to the channel. RSS Cloud is not limited to RSS feeds but can also be used with other feed formats such as Atom. On September 7, 2009 WordPress became the first large supporter of the protocol, enabling the <cloud> tag for over 7.5 million hosted blogs on WordPress.com.

In computing, Open Data Protocol (OData) is an open protocol that allows the creation and consumption of queryable and interoperable Web service APIs in a standard way. Microsoft initiated OData in 2007. Versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 are released under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. Version 4.0 was standardized at OASIS, with a release in March 2014. In April 2015 OASIS submitted OData v4 and OData JSON Format v4 to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for approval as an international standard. In December 2016, ISO/IEC published OData 4.0 Core as ISO/IEC 20802-1:2016 and the OData JSON Format as ISO/IEC 20802-2:2016.

WebSub is an open protocol for distributed publish–subscribe communication on the Internet. Initially designed to extend the Atom protocols for data feeds, the protocol can be applied to any data type as long as it is accessible via HTTP. Its main purpose is to provide real-time notifications of changes, which improves upon the typical situation where a client periodically polls the feed server at some arbitrary interval. In this way, WebSub provides pushed HTTP notifications without requiring clients to spend resources on polling for changes.

References

  1. "LeWeb: Superfeedr – the lube for the real-time web?" TechCrunch, retrieved 4 May 2015
  2. "Medium has acquired content feed provider Superfeedr". SiliconANGLE. 2016-06-03. Retrieved 2024-01-27.
  3. "The Internet Archive". notifixio.us. The Internet Archive. September 23, 2009. Archived from the original on September 23, 2009. Retrieved August 15, 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  4. "The Internet Archive". notifixio.us. The Internet Archive. January 5, 2010. Archived from the original on December 25, 2009. Retrieved August 15, 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  5. "Terms of Service - Superfeedr". Superfeedr. Retrieved August 15, 2016.
  6. "Medium acquires Superfeedr, a real-time API that supercharges your feeds". TechCrunch. 2 June 2016. Retrieved August 29, 2017.
  7. Genestoux, Julien (11 October 2011). "Superfeedr". FLOSS Weekly (Interview). Interviewed by Newcomb, Aaron. 12 minutes in. Retrieved 14 June 2021. We built this thing that we call the feed graph that relates feeds together based on past updates but based also on links that we can find online, assuming that if one of them is updated, another one is going to be updated as well.
  8. "Tracking Feeds" Superfeedr, retrieved 2 May 2015.
  9. Miller, Alaska (November 8, 2009). "Mark Cuban And Betaworks Invest In Superfeedr". Business Insider. Retrieved August 15, 2014.