netvibes - (re)mix the web

You might not have noticed it, but in addition to completely revamping our Ecosystem (you didn’t know? check it out!), we’ve been silently adding new functionalities here and there, for developers to play with.

One of these “toys” is the expanded Timeline Search. As a Netvibes user, you must know about the User Timeline, where a user can post his good links, his favorite posts or simply his though of the moment, and let all your followers see them.

These three kinds of item can be posted to the timeline, respectively, using the Star-It widget (which uses the new widget.addStar() method, so you can also build starring within you own widgets), via a click on the little star that is displayed by some widgets (one of which is the internal feed reader, so that makes it easy for blog posts and podcasts), and the My Community widget (which you can find in the Essential Widget section of the Add Content panel). 

It’s all fine and dandy, but you might think that all this data is only available to logged-in Netvibes users who chose to follow your Universe - and therefore, quite walled-garden-y for the reste of teh intarwebs. Luckily, there’s more than that.

When we announced the Netvibes REST API a couple months ago, it already gave a lot of power to developers, like retrieving the whole content of a Netvibes Universe in XML form, but the documentation for the Timeline Search method wasn’t really complete a the time. We’ve been working towards improving it, and the result is that you can now easily use the Timeline data just about anywhere, thanks to an expanded set of options.

In short, the expanded Timeline Search makes it possible for anyone to create services or tools based on public Timeline data retrieval! Desktop apps, anyone?

The documentation itself features a handful of ideas already:

• Need to pull the 100 last public status updates in Atom format? You can do it.
• Want to know who’s been mentioning the iPhone 3G lately, and get it in JSON? Have a lookee here.
• Feel like visiting the recent favorite links of one’s followers, in XML? Here you go.
• Fan of the “FAIL” meme, and want to know who’s been commenting items with “FAIL”? Yup, can do.

This is just a part of what can be done with the REST API, and an avant-goût of things to come from our recent developments. Until we uncover these, you advise you to have a closer look at all the possibilities of the Netvibes REST API, which can offer a lot more than searching public timelines…
 

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Articles, News, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.