FriendFeed announced today that it has released version 2 of the FriendFeed API for beta testing. The focus, according to the company, is making the API simpler to use.
“FriendFeed seems to be staying one (or two or three) step(s) ahead of Twitter in everything they do,” notes Jesse Stay of the Stay N’ Alive blog. “Today FriendFeed released their real-time stream of data in beta to any and all developers wishing to write applications. Unlike Twitter, there is no application necessary, no NDA to sign, and all is controlled by simple OAuth. This also means users of FriendFeed-based applications will no longer need to get their special key to manually enter as was previously required.”
New features include:
– Real-time APIs – utilize long polling to get feeds in real-time, including search!
– Flexible sharing options – Direct message users. Share to multiple feeds.
– File attachments – Attach images, pdfs, spreadsheets, etc.– OAuth support
– Simplified response format
“Your application doesn’t need to know the difference between a users and groups, how ‘friend of friend’ works, or deal with hidden entries until you want to,” explains FriendFeed. “We provide the HTML for representing entries so you don’t have to construct it. Authenticated responses include a list of possible commands on every feed, entry, and comment so you don’t have to do the detective work.”
The documentation for the API can be viewed here. Other resources include a Python library that implements the new API methods and OAuth Support, and a sample application. Here’s the source code for that.
