The Filter: Team Blog

The latest release of TheFilter website  includes an RSS service to which users can subscribe to get recommendations and filtered news fed directly to their favourite rss aggregator.

You  can get to these by clicking on the RSS buttons on the start/index  pages.

There are also a few new features that are not yet exposed via website controls, but you can get to them directly by creating the the url  for the rss feed  yourself.  The URLs follow this general pattern:-

http://webservices.thefilter.com/3.0/FilterRssService/FilterRss.ashx?user=<userid>&number=<N>&type=<feedid>&genre=<gid>

where userid = your user id, N is the number of items items to return, and feedid is one of the  following:-
 
0 - music recommendation
1 - film recommendation
2 - webclip recommendation
3 - music news
4 - film news
5 - all items shared with (to) you (including cached recommendations  from 0,1,2 )  
6 - all ratings you have made
7 - all items you have played
8 - your influence cloud (special case; number=0 shows rating cloud, number>0  shows velocity cloud , which shows what is _changing_ )
9 - your recent activity  (ratings, plays, shares etc.)
10 - all recent activity  (a view of what all users are doing)  

[genre=<gid> is optional for feedid=0,1,2 i.e. for music/film/webclip recs. it is ignored for other  feeds.]
 
items  0.. 4  are run on a refresh cycle of 1 hour, with results cached in the intermediate time .  These are accessible from the RSS buttons on the website home page.

items 6-10  are new, and included for you to play with. All are done on demand i.e. not cached.

http://webservices.thefilter.com/3.0/FilterRssService/FilterRss.ashx?user=1228&type=8&number=0

There’s a fair bit of work to be done in visualising the influence cloud data, and RSS isn’t necessarily the best transport for complex visual data like this, but this was thrown in mainly as a debugging aid for me developing the underlying cloud algorithms.  Lots of people here liked the idea that we could look at the info in this way, hence I sneaked it into the public RSS feeds 

I hope you find these new features useful, and i look forwards to hearing your suggestions for other service information that could be provided through this feed mechanism.