Ashutosh Nilkanth's Blog

Within the past 2 months, we have had three new commercial partners who are now using Feedity for their data integration processes. Modesty aside, I always feel that a good service becomes even better once its time-tested and is commercially viable for reinvestment in its technology infrastructure.

With Feedity doing good so far, me and my small team, will solidfy Feedity’s service architecture to make it even better, by migrating the Feedity core application to a clustered environment. A new clustered hosting platform will mainly handle service-level routing, load-balancing and resource allocation among the commercial-customers nodes and the public-access nodes. This will result in smoother service delivery and optimum performance. I’ll post an update on this in the coming days.

Here’s some new buzz on the blogosphere about Feedity (also see past testimonials):

Feeds from any Web – Network World, by Mark Gibbs

Incredibly clever and very effective. … This service is actually more complex “under the hood” than it might appear and should provide and excellent platform for many mashups.

Finally! RSS feeds for any website!, by Josh Fraser

Thankfully Feedity has come to my rescue.

Hassle Free RSS Generation @ AFeedIsBorn

And so far it seems to be a good tool for creating webfeeds – for any webpage.

Thanks to all the Feedity users and supporters!

I’ve been thinking of internationalization (i18n) and language encoding issues with Feedity for a while, but couldn’t spare enough time to fix it for good. Some Feedity users reported content encoding problems with the generated web feeds for non-English web pages.

Althought Feedity was designed to support some level of Unicode compliance, but still it was not vastly flexible. Finally, I’ve rewritten the Remote Content Handler module of Feedity with much better support for foreign languages. The tricky part was to detect the original character set of the remote webpage (i.e. feed source). I resolved it by first checking the HTTP Response Header “content-type”, and if its invalid or not found, then falling back to the HTML “content-type” meta-tag. That’s the broader resolution, but it can be easily programmed in any language. I’ve successfully implemented it in ASP.NET (C#) for Feedity, and in PHP5 for another project.

If anyone still faces a problem with content encoding of the generated feeds on Feedity, then please contact our dev team.

Earlier, I wrote about the beta launch of spigit – an online community for startup ideas. So far I’m finding spigit to be quite interesting. Feedity is also featured on spigit as one of the selected 25 startups, and its good to see that it has climbed up in ranking as one of the top 5 ideas on spigit.

spigit is a virtual community where users review and rate featured startups/ideas. A startup has to progress through three stages: incubation, validation, and emergence, based on various milestones. The incubation stage is centered around creating enough buzz, the validation stage is where the experts and rankings play part, and finally the emergence stage is where the startup can go through an IPO in a virtual stock market simulation. Overall, the spigit system has been developed as a social networking service for startups and a virtual market game. The website is clean and utilizes Ajax for many features, giving it some smooth usability.

Let’s take a quick tour. The first-generation web, Web 1.0 (prior to 1998), with its text-only web pages, centered around the “web browser” (application host). Web 2.0 (2002-2007) is centered around interaction (application dynamics and logic). The Web 2.0 trend is bloated with API’s, mashups, Ajax, wikis, social-networking etc., but it does not expose the data itself. In the coming time, we’ll gradually shift to Web 3.0, the third-generation web, probably the final frontier in the decomposition of monolithic nature of the web into discrete “data” components.

Today, when someone mentions that xyz.com is a new “web service”, it doesn’t actually mean that its a true “web service” but rather a “web-based service”. However, Web 3.0 will bring true “web services” into the mainstream. Web 3.0 is about exposing the data model on the web. It transforms web pages to (reusable) web services, and thereby transforming the Web into a database. Web 3.0 is going to deliver a new generation of business applications. And I must say that RSS will be a driving factor in this process. RSS will lay the pipeline for the new service architecture.

Update: Read about Web4.0 on Seth Godin’s blog.

Sometime back, Cait e-mailed me to participate (on behalf of Feedity) in a survey centered around Australian Internet-startup’s. The survey results can be viewed online, although I think its still missing responses from a few other participants.

There are plenty of interesting Internet startup’s emerging from down-under, but the state of investment in technology ventures seems a bit stale (except Sydney maybe). Moreover, the amount of buzz you can create for your product/service, working out of the US (through interviews, podcasts, exhibits, and seminars etc.) is enourmous compared to any other place. The Silicon Valley still rules! From anywhere else, you’ll have to try much harder (and be very patient) to get your product or service noticed.