Nooked Technology

Technologies

feedcommerce is enabled through effective use of existing internet technologies only - it requires no protocols, data formats or user interface platforms that are not already in widespread use on the internet. Structured data, feed protocols/APIs and widgets give us the foundation for feedcommerce. Here we discuss some of the technologies that underpin feedcommerce in further detail:

Feed Syndication

The RSS and Atom Syndication standards are the core pieces of feedcommerce - they enable the syndication of product content through standard web infrastructure to the consumer. Neither require further introduction as they have already evolved into critical elements of the existing internet infrastructure already.

Feed Publishing

In feedcommerce maintenance of published feeds is a critical task. Retailers need to be sure that their published feeds are always available and that they accurately represent the current product itinerary. Traditionally RSS and Atom feeds are created on an ad-hoc basis using tools that are specific to the creators software (and hardware) environment. However, for a large scale product based feeds these solutions typically do not scale or provide the analytic feedback required by the owner.

The recently published Atom Publishing Protocol (APP or AtomPub) aims to solve the problem of publishing feed content. It defines a uniform RESTful protocol for manipulating feeds and entries that are hosted on a dedicated feed platform server. The nooked FeedPlatform is built from the ground up to support AtomPub manipulation of feeds. This approach allows retailers to publish product data to feeds in a much more controlled and granular manner. Rather than having to continually republish the entire feed (which would be impractical for large full product catalog feeds) our AtomPub support allow the feed publisher to manipulate (create/update/delete) individual feed entries via HTTP based APIs.

APP Service

Already many prominent online services are publishing APP compliant APIs. For example the Google Base data API and YouTube are both based on the Google Data protocol that, in turn, is based on the APP specification.

Feed Item Formats

The RSS and Atom syndication specifications already define the semantics of how to interpret feeds. However, for feedcommerce, each feed item must also express the semantics of the contained data so that publishers can interpret it in an automated and correct manner. A number of established and emerging open standards exist that define how variety of 'product' information can be represented within feed items:

Microformats

Microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. They are basically a way to standardize on different types of data - events, listings, reviews, calendars etc.

Microformats and structured data in general have an important role to play in feedcommerce. Susan Mernit notes this:

Widgets could be flavor of the moment, but the ways that some widgets intersect with structured data (as opposed to intersecting with flashy, AJAX DHTML fancy effects) is one of the things I find compelling...
Susan Mernit

Google Data

Google is enabling many of its online service to exchange structured data based on the Google Data (GData) API. GData seves as a good example of a rich vocabulary for defining product data within Atom or RSS feed entries/items.