[ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

Microfeed will change the way applications are communicating with micro-blogging sites and other feed-based services!

Microfeed is a specification and a reference implementation of D-Bus-based client-server architecture providing access to various micro-blogging sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Qaiku, and Laconi.ca. Also other services that have feed-type interface can be intergrated into the framework.

By utilizing the Microfeed architecture, a client application can focus on user interface, while actual feed fetching is done in the background independently. The client application simply subscribes the feeds it is interested, and a provider publishes new information when it is received. The Microfeed has unified format for various messages, and supports also updating of status information in micro-blogging sites.

Mauku will be the first application that utilizes the Microfeed backend. There is already Mauku Widget available for Fremantle in the extras-devel (source). The idea of the Microfeed architecture is that multiple applications can utilize the same information at the same time.

Microfeed is an open source software project. You are invited to participate! You can contribute in many ways, such as:

• Spread the word: tell other developer that they could use Microfeed.
• Utilize the specification and/or the reference implemenation in your own client application.
• Write and fix documentation. Make it easier to understand.
• Provide example applications and tutorials.
• Review and test the implementation and write bug reports.
• Write bindings to other languages, such as Python. You can also rewrite the reference implementation (especially the subscriber side of the library) in other language on top of the D-Bus.
• Implement new providers. Especially Facebook provider would be nice!
• Enhance the specification and/or the reference implementation.

For more information, visit microfeed.org.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

does this allow for end users to aggregate profiles from those various services?

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

Seems to be The Right Thing(tm) to do these things. I hope this gets used on the Desktop, too, so the microfeed library gets widespread use and this way has lots of people wanting it to be stable and fast.

Also nice to see this coming from someone who has had experience developing a Microblogging client for some time now, so the API is probably what an app developer wishes for :)

Good move!

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

Congratulations and best luck with this projects. Hopefully you get users for this backend and contributors!

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

I hope we see a mauku using it on diablo soon ;)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

Is the Qaiku feed working to you? I checked login/psw many times but doesn't load. Twitter works fine.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

Also, what is the arrow/triangle in the middle supposed to do? I would expect it to go to the last post but it doesn't go anywhere.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

I had the same problem and didn't know that I have to "enable" the API in the Qaiku settings. Tero came across with that hint :) Afterwards it worked.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

Ah no, what makes sense is that clicking the middle arrow opens the browser with the original URL, isn't it.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

This should be a good topic/demo at the Summit!

Welcome back Henrik!

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

It will open the item (tweet or similar) in the forthcoming Mauku 2.0 Application. That way you can see the details of the item, reply to it, forward (retweet) it, browse the history etc. The Mauku Widget is simple way to check the latest items, but the actual application is to the way to do the rest.

(Maybe there should be a separate thread for Mauku Widget. ;)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

Microfeed should be possible to just recompile in Diablo also, but modifying Mauku version 0.x or backporting the new Mauku 2.0 Application to Diablo is somehow bigger task. I am focusing on Fremantle version now, but maybe later I have time to do something with the legacy platforms too.

However, Mauku and Microfeed are open source projects, so, if someone has time and skills, she/he could join in and make this happen sooner. Should I announce that "open (source) positions available: Mauku legacy maintainer"? ;)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

I just alerted the Mojito maintainer as Microfeed would probably be useful there too. More code and service sharing between Maemo and Moblin can't be bad :D

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

Version 0.2 of the implemention is out now. The API has been changed a bit, and is still expected to be changed before version 1.0 is out. There are also other enhancements and bug fixes done during the development of Mauku 2.0 application for Fremantle.

http://www.microfeed.org/

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

I have released version 0.3 last night. The API has been changed slightly again and internal implementation a lot. The aim has been stability. The development will focus on optimisations next.

http://www.microfeed.org/

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

Version 0.4 of the implementation of Microfeed is released. It introduces so called virtual feeds that make easy to implement comment tracking and channels for services supporting such functionality.

Mauku 2.0 beta 3 and Mauku Widget version 0.9.3 are based on this version of the library.

And yes, this is open source software project, released under GPL/LGPL (see COPYING file in the distribution).

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

The source code of the reference implementation of Microfeed is now hosted in Gitorius: http://gitorious.org/microfeed

The database backend is reimplemented from scratch. The library is not using Berkeley DB anymore. Thus, it is not required to use GPL license in some components, and the whole Microfeed library is released under LGPL now.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

Nice but how to compile it? :D I need to write Python backend of it and after that support of microfeed in Gwibber :)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

Good question, thanks for asking. Here are the basic steps:

• Fetch the source code
  
  Code:

  ---

        git clone git://gitorious.org/microfeed/libmicrofeed.git

  ---

• Enter the source code directory
  
  Code:

  ---

        cd libmicrofeed

  ---

• Generate the configure.sh script (autotools are required)
  
  Code:

  ---

        autoreconf --install

  ---

• Configure the package
  
  Code:

  ---

        ./configure --prefix=/usr

  ---

• Compile the source code
  
  Code:

  ---

        make

  ---

• Install the library
  
  Code:

  ---

        make install

  ---

• Leave the directory
  
  Code:

  ---

        cd ..

  ---

After that you need to compile and install also the microfeed-utils and the microfeed-providers-unstable packages. Just substitute the word libmicrofeed with those and perform the same steps.

I also wrote these instructions into a wiki page:

http://gitorious.org/microfeed/pages/Compiling

Nice! :) I discussed about the topic with Ryan in Maemo Summit. Microfeed and Gwibber could be a perfect match and benefit each other.

For Gwibber, it would be enough to either write a new implementation of libmicrofeed-subscriber from scratch in Python or just to make Python bindings for it. For starters at least. As microfeed is operating on top of D-Bus, the subscriber (client) part is fairly straightforward to implement.

See the specification (http://microfeed.org/specification/) and the source code of microfeed-subscriber module (http://gitorious.org/microfeed/libmi...eed-subscriber). Please note that the current version of the specification is a little out dated (new features introduced and others are fine tuned), so the reference implementation is formative for now. This will change of course before version 1.0. :)

If you want to implement new providers in Python, then it would be feasible to make Python bindings for the rest of the library (libmicrofeed-common and libmicrofeed-provider). Those contain over 10k LOC of logic (caching, for example).

Actually, it is too verbose to write a new provider for now. (See, for example, the current Twitter implementation: http://gitorious.org/microfeed/micro...master/twitter) There are many patterns that have to be copied (mostly as is) when implementing a new provider. I will further encapsulate common logic into the library itself, so the provider implementation should be more straightforward in the future.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Microfeed: Backend for accessing micro-blogging sites
 

Does the microfeed backend support encryption during authentication to service like Twitter or does it send authentication info in clear text?