coll8 Social Media Streaming

Update: coll8 has been retired due to the unstable nature of the data source at Friendfeed.

coll8, named as an abbreviation of the English word “collate”, allows users of the WordPress publishing software to provide website visitors with a page which collates all of their social media streams into one place: from Twitter and Flickr to Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube and Google Reader. Further services can be added fairly simply as required; the links page here at Permanent Tourist shows the most recent updates from the services I use most frequently. The standard implementation loads new data from a remote data server automatically once per hour, whereupon JSON data is automatically cached. This ensures reliability and maximum performance when dealing with a third-party data provider and helps to ensure 100% data availability.

A future development of the coll8 system will be to provide a standalone data collation server. The reliability of third-party service Friendfeed, from which data is currently drawn, has been brought into question and the system presents a few issues which cannot be resolved optimally. Therefore, my own equivalent will take over soon.

coll8 is currently a work in progress and only available to a select handful of friends in the short term. The initial version of the system, which gains its information from third party service Friendfeed, has already been implemented to the Burson-Marsteller EMEA websites in the guise of BM Talk, which I developed through my day job for the Swiss-based Crossmedia team.

Websites currently using coll8

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