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FriendFeed Launches API

FriendFeed, the popular activity stream aggregation service have just announced their API. FriendFeed is a service that allows users to create content streams akin to the Facebook newsfeed by telling it what third-party services they use like Flickr, Twitter and del.icio.us. Friends and family can then share and subscribe to each others feeds. Given how white hot this platform is at the moment we can expect developers to jump on this API quickly. As ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick points-out this API has lots of potential and might be as popular with developers as the Twitter API, which drives them 10x more traffic than their site does.

The new FriendFeed API is REST-based and provides access to these feeds in a variety of data formats including XML, JSON, RSS and Atom. It supports a variety of read functions as well as the ability to write new links, messages, images and comments. More technical details in our new FriendFeed API profile.

Other details from the launch:

For users, a “remote key” is used to grant access. “A remote key is a kind of password that you can give to third-party applications and websites to let them interact with FriendFeed on your behalf. There are limits to what can be done using a remote key, which means it’s a lot safer than giving a site your FriendFeed password.”
Support for OAuth is coming
They’ve provided PHP and Python libraries to help get developers up to speed quickly
Other API resources include an FAQ and forum

FriendFeed itself is a mashup in that they use both RSS feeds and third party APIs to aggregate the data in their streams. As time goes on we’re seeing more services that both consume the APIs of others as well as publish APIs of their own.