FeedFlare Is Open For Business

You may have noticed that the bottom of this post has a few new links, like email this post, add it to delicious, number of technorati links (when there are links), subscribe to this feed, and digg this feed.

A few of these were on my blog already, but Charlie and I had hacked them into our typepad templates.

You don’t need to do template hacking anymore now that FeedBurner has launched a great new service called FeedFlare (which comes with a companion service called SiteFlare). 

Here’s the deal.  The whole thing is built around an open API so anyone can create a flare.  For example the "digg this feed" flare was not built by Digg, it was built by a guy named Ross Belmont.

FeedBurner already has over 101 suggested "flares" and more are getting built every day.  Go take a look at what you can now add to your feed, your website, or your blog.

All the blogger or the website operator needs to do is put a small snippet of FeedBurner code in their template to activate SiteFlare.  FeedFlare comes standard on any FeedBurner hosted feed.

Then you go into the FeedBurner configuration page, select what "flares" you want, and you are done.

Now all the website operators and bloggers can leverage the work of developers who know how to use the Flare API.  It’s the beginning of a new ecosystem for blog and feed metadata sharing and FeedBurner is powering it all for free.

Obviously FeedBurner benefits by making life better for their customers.  And the metadata that all this generates will be valuable to the web services who participate in the "flare ecosystem".  So its a win/win for everyone, the web sites and bloggers, the third party web services that can now show up on the blog and feed, and FeedBurner too.

I you want to enable more interactivity and data sharing on your websites, your blogs, and your feeds, go check out FeedFlare and SiteFlare at FeedBurner.

#VC & Technology