OPML – Rob Fahrni

Hayseed: “Stream is a different take on feed readers. It displays your feeds in a timeline, similar to Twitter.”

Yes, I finally shipped Stream 1.0!

The response has been so overwhelming, not in a OMG 100,000 people downloaded it, more of OMG the Mac and iOS community are so supportive. When I started on Stream I was really excited to share it with everyone. Over time that enthusiasm waned because it was taking so long to finish. I worked on it an hour here an hour there over the course of two years. Yes, two years.

I’ve received some really excellent feedback via Twitter and email. I hope that continues and I hope to incorporate some, if not all, of that feedback into Stream, but it could take quite a long time before I’m able to do it. I just want to get that out there. Stream is a labor of love. If I could make a living from it I would definitely pump out features at a much quicker pace. Please bear with me.

Thanks again for your support and encouragement. It means loads to me.

In 2002 I did a little experiment. With a little help from Dave Winer I generated a Visio VDX file from OPML. It was pretty straight forward. The idea at the time was to create a web service that could create a pretty picture of your connections to other weblogs and crawl those connections to create, you guessed it, a graph representing all your connections. Obviously I never finished it.

The reason I mention it is Facebook has done it, but it’s behind closed doors. It’s a Facebook thing. This is something the entire web could benefit from. What would it take for someone to create Open Graph as an open standard for showing relationships between sites? Facebook has an Open Graph spec. How can that be opened up?