Tzetze Fly

I’m doing a lot of reading right now about feed protocols like Atom. Google basically uses Atom to provide feeds for all their data sources, but they add a query component to it and call it GData. Man – this stuff is powerful, yet super easy to use. I guess that description pretty much sums up everything Google does.

An Atom feed is an XML standard that is very easy to parse/consume, either using straight XPath or with a language specific toolkit. In Ruby, I currently use FeedTools. Most browsers (I have tried Firefox and Safari) are able to display an Atom feed in a pleasant way, so you can enter the sample urls below right into them and see the results.

The parameters on these urls should be very self explanatory. Feel free to try different values, like changing the city name to your city.

Show videos on YouTube for homes for sale in Boca Raton:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?vq=home+for+sale+boca+raton&max-results=20

Show listings on Google Base for homes for sale in Boca Raton:

http://www.google.com/base/feeds/snippets?bq=home+for+sale+boca+raton&max-results=20

Obviously, these are pretty simple examples and just scratch the surface, but the point is that producing feeds using the Atom standard allows Google to expose their data in a standard, easily parsed format that are simple to consume.

I’ll have something soon on consuming your Google Reader shared items.

More YouTube GData developer docs here.

More Google Base GData developer docs here.