Feeds are the most ubiquitous API: almost each service that publishes content has feeds.
However, there are an incredible number of different formats and extensions when you dig a layer deeper than just RSS or Atom. There's RSS (0.90, 0.91, 1.0, 0.92, 0.93, 2.0) and Atom (0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 1.0) .
Once you've tackled the different formats that you'll encounter, you'll want to implement smart techniques which reduce the amount of blind polling that you need to perform. You'll look at both PubSubHubbub and RSSCloud in addition to never ending streams of content like Twitter provides. You're not done yet, millions of blogs still ping services like Weblogs.com which publishes changes.xml every five minutes.
Believe us yet? There's a lot of custom infrastructure you'll need to build and maintain to stay up to date with feeds from many different services.
At Superfeedr, we take all of this complexity out of your way.
In both cases, we use open standards, so you're not locked in with Superfeedr. While you're always free to leave, we know that you'll stay because we're doing a great job.
Also, we guarantee that you'll be pushed new content within fifteen minutes of it being published. But we don't stop there, we've implemented a few different helpers including PubSubHubbub, RssCloud, and subscribe to real time streams to push you new content within seconds.
Convinced yet? Superfeedr is free for the first 1,000 feeds.
Superfeedr