
The Yahoo Firehose: Get access to our public Updates activity stream - nreece
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/04/yahoo_updates_firehose.html
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randomwalker
Ha! When I tweeted the following a few days ago I had no idea this
announcement was coming.

<http://twitter.com/random_walker/status/11917456790>

"within a few years there will be a real-time stream that aggregates
essentially all activity anywhere on the web"

While Twitter, Wordpress, etc. have firehoses, this announcement is different
-- aggregation across multiple services. I think the concept is very powerful
and is something I've been looking into over the past few weeks.

I'm curious how many people know about Spinn3r (spinn3r.com) -- they claim to
provide a real-time hose of all updates in the blogosphere. They quoted me
$6k/mo. Unfortunately, Spinn3r's main product was deadpooled last year, so I'm
not sure what their future is as a company. I think they should have made the
real-time stream their main product. In a way they were too early.

Another startup called Superfeedr takes a different approach. They charge on a
per-feed (or per-entry) basis, so their up-front costs aren't as huge. They
currently cater to customers who might only want a few hundred or a few
thousand specific feeds, but as they scale up they should be able to offer a
bulk stream of essentially the entire blogosphere.

Then there's Google Buzz, which is also about aggregating different services.
They don't currently offer a firehose but apparently you can build one
yourself using PubSubHubbub, although developers report that it isn't working
so great: [http://groups.google.com/group/google-buzz-
api/browse_thread...](http://groups.google.com/group/google-buzz-
api/browse_thread/thread/8dd226beacccd7f4)

But the long-term trend is clear. We're going to have an "uberhose" at some
point! I have a few applications in mind of things that such a pipe would
enable that are fundamentally not possible today, but I'm curious what ideas
other people have.

~~~
julien
Nice market segmentation :) As for Superfeedr, we already have a pretty big
chunk of the blogsphere and as long as you know what you want (feeds), we can
provide that to you. Other services that you mention suffer from spam, because
they have a "extensive" approach. In our case, we'd rather let our users
decide what they want, rather than filter for them.

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callmeed
First off, why would Yahoo!'s firehose have "YouTube favoriting" in it?

If they continue to aggregate 3rd party data and put it all in an easily
accessible firehose, I could see this being _really_ useful.

I haven't used them a lot, but Yahoo!'s developer stuff seems pretty handy.
Would be nice to see them reinvent themselves or really push this division
much like Amazon AWS has.

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pierrefar
How much will this cost?

It's a very cool service that only a company the size of Yahoo! (and Google,
Bing, etc) can provide due to the infrastructure needed for crawling and
serving. It would be interesting if this was the first of many Yahoo! moves in
which they shift from a pure search + portal to data providers. Their APIs
already do that, but this is much bigger.

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gcb
Yahoo suffers a lot of stigma. Maybe because most of us passed a fase where
all serious programers had switched to google. I know ppl thar dislikes yui
only based on preconcepts about yahoo.

how comfortable are you on depending on yahoo services and why?

