Onaswarm is now provides a interface for finding out the social network connectivity of webpages. Connections are discovered using XFN, hCard, FOAF, optionally Google's SGN services and in some instances custom APIs if account information is available to Onaswarm.

URI

• http://onaswarm.com/admin/sgn-query/

Parameters

• uri - the URI of a page you'd like to discover social network details for
• wrapper - if "ajax", the results will be returned in JSON format
• json_pretty - boolean; the results will be pretty printed
• jsonp - if non-empty, the results will be placed in a JSONP wrapper
• reverse - boolean; the results will reflect links to this page, as opposed to outbound from this page
• google - boolean; add results from Google Social Graph API. In HTML mode, this defaults to True; in AJAX, False.
• appkey - coming soon

Example Queries

• http://onaswarm.com/admin/sgn-query/

form interface

• http://onaswarm.com/admin/sgn-query/?uri=http://twitter.com/bvl/

all links from Twitter user "bvl" in HTML, augmented with Google SGN results

• http://onaswarm.com/admin/sgn-query/?uri=http://twitter.com/bvl/&wrapper=ajax&json_pretty=1&reverse=0&google=0

all links outbound from Twitter user "bvl", without Google SGN results

• http://agwego.net/admin/sgn-query/?action=query&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdanbri.org%2Ffoaf.rdf&wrapper=ajax&json_pretty=1

Dan Brickley's FOAF file

• http://agwego.net/admin/sgn-query/?action=query&uri=http://tantek.com/&wrapper=ajax&google=0&json_pretty=1

Notes

• if our server is experiencing unusual loads, this API will return 503 errors
• there's a lot more we could do with the FOAF files - tell us what
• if we did FOAF output, would you use it?
• we will be using appkeys to access to API in the near future, mainly to stop robots from crawling the web through our API!

We're migrating the data in Onaswarm to a high performance network attached disk ... we expect we'll be back by 8 AM EDT.

Onaswarm is pleased to announce that we’ve set up a “swarm” especially for the Metronauts / Transit Camp community. Your swarm – http://metronauts.onaswarm.com – will create a lifestream to capture and share all community posts, twits and photos about this community.

Signing up

If you don’t have an Onaswarm account, signing up is very easy:

• go to http://onaswarm.com/admin/create/
• enter the promotion code “metronauts”

You’ll then be lead through a set of simple steps to add your profile and social network information. You’ll automatically be added to the metronauts swarm.

If you already have an Onaswarm account:

• login
• go to http://metronauts.onaswarm.com
• click on the “Join Swarm” link in the About box

Posting

ou must use the “metronauts” tag when posting in order for your post to show up on the Metronauts group:

• on del.icio.us, Word Press and Flickr, add “metronauts” to the tag field
• on Twitter and Pownce, use the hash tag “#metronauts” in your twit – you can see examples of this on the Metronauts swarm

Generally your post/twit/photo will show up in Onaswarm about 15 – 30 minutes after posting, depending on load. Del.icio.us feeds are only checked every hour, due to terms of use restrictions so they may take a little bit longer to show up.

Widgets

If you’re interested in displaying the Metronauts swarm lifestream on your blog or webpage, try adding our widget:

• http://onaswarm.com/users/dpjanes/widget/

It’ll only take a few seconds.

There's too major/minor issues we're trying to solve with Onaswarm right now:

• when new Swarms are created, users don't seem to be showing up in the results, at least for a while
• when new Feeds are added, they're not being prioritized properly. Ideally we'd like to see new feeds show up within seconds.

We're calling these major/minor problems because although they're affecting functionality in a nasty way, we expect the fixes to be rather small. And implemented ASAP...

We're getting closer and closer to a new official version. We've just finishing coding in the XFN bits...

If the Onaswarm widget isn’t suitable for your needs, youcan now customize it using your own CSS commands.

First, here’s the URL to get the “raw” widget code:

http://dpjanes.onaswarm.com/index.widget

Obviously you’ll want to change “dpjanes” to whatever youraccount is. If you open that page using “View Source” you’ll be able to see theCSS commands were currently use. You’ll probably want to use that as the basisfor your CSS.

To add your CSS, just add ‘?:css=<css-url>’ to the URLand it will remove our CSS and add a pointer to yours.

There are several other options too:

• add ‘:raw=1’ to remove the HTML HEAD and BODY stuff
• add ‘:jsonp=<function>’ to covert the HTML to a jsonp function call

Note: this will be in tomorrow’s update (14 January 2008)

We've added banner ads to the top of pages. Please let us know if you hate this.

RotorBlog.com:

Ever wanted to collect all your web content under one web hub or portal? Is Yahoo Pipes too complicated for you and you want a simple way of gathering your web contents from weblogs, social networking sites and bookmarks? Onaswarm is the best solution I’ve encountered so far.

Onaswarm is a new web service which is currently in beta stage. It lets you collect web contents from your various weblogs, social networks, photo sharing services, social bookmarking sites, e-mail and dump all of these content into one web hub which full searchable indexed and tagged portals called lifestream.

Don’t be misled; Onaswarm is not just another aggregator. Onaswarm aggregates your content just like other RSS aggregators (Bloglines, Google Reader, etc.). But what sets it apart from the usual feed aggregators is the fact that you can create a swarm composed of lifestreams covering the same topic of interests.

And there's more: go read the whole thing.

Thank you very much to Leslie Poston for this verykind(pre-Christmas) review of Onaswarm at Profy:

Have you been looking for a place to put all of your Web 2.0 information? A solution to the pressing need to keep track of all of your social networks, RSS feeds, photo streams, calendar items and more? Look no further, OnaSwarm is here.

I've seen a few other Web 2.0 solutions that have claimed to offer the same "all in one place" Web 2.0 service, but OnaSwarm is hands down the most comprehensive. It offers a way to keep track of as many social networks, feeds and accounts as you want. Imagine - all of your Web 2.0 identities all in one convenient place.

There's a lot more than that; go on over and have a read.

We did an update to Onaswarm this morning:

• page loading should be much faster, especially after the first time you see a page. It's still not quite a fast as we would like, but we have a few more tricks up our sleeves that should speed it up that much more soon
• check out the Timeline page: a work in progress, but neato

Rannie "Photojunkie" writes:

Do you ever feel like you are being hit by too much information online? Personally, having some sort of blog presence over the last 7 years you definitely start spreading your oats all over the internet. Especially with sites like flickr, del.icio.us, and twitter, to name a few. Micro blogging and regular blogging seems to be throwing content at your from all sides.

Awhile back, someone asked me, how I go about reading blogs. I told them that I didn’t use a feed reader and that I don’t really read many blog anymore, at least not on a regular daily basis like I used to. It’s especially hard now when I can read the content of any given friend on 5 or 6 different services. Talk about being disjointed. I think I finally found a way to keep things together all in one place. It’s this new site called Onaswarm. It was created by a friend of mine and fellow Torcamper, David Janes. Bascially, it allows you to share all your different feeds from different services all in one place. It also allows you to follow your friends in a similiar manner.

Sure it sounds like another social network, but I think it’s more than that. It’s more like online content management.

One of the highlights for me is being able to watch the ins and outs from a variety of people in the Toronto community, all in one place. I can watch them blog and twitter and flickr without jumping from site to site. Call me lazy, but I don’t really have much time to be everywhere online at once, even with tabbed browsing. The main idea here is that people can create a Lifestream, which is a feed of all your feeds.

If you wanna give Onaswarm Beta a try, ping me. I think I have some invites.

Thanks Rannie! He adds:

UPDATE: I must add, that I wrote the post in hopes of winning an iPod Touch. That being said, I really do think there is a lot of potential with using onaswarm

And you out there trying to read this should be trying to win our iPod on Monday also. Just start here.

We did a significant update to Onaswarm this morning:

• Everywhere where we used to refer to "feeds" we now refer to "social networks". We believe this may be a little more clear
• We've simplified the "friend" relationship (which is really more like the Twitter "follows" idea, so we may be changing that more soon) so you don't choose to "aggregate into my account". Rather, you'll see to the right links for "Calendar", "Lifeblog" and "Lifestream"; next to those is a "+ friends" links, which you can click on to show what your friends are up to
• We've made a number of database improvements that should make things a little faster

We did a small upgrade:

• the Calendar is now a list of events

We just did a quick update of Onaswarm:

• options such as "Join Onaswarm" are displayed only if you're not logged in and "Post" if you are logged in
• there are now three Presentation options for your account: Weblog (full body, but don't show imported items), Lifeblog (full body, all items) and Lifestream (everything in summary mode)

We updated Onaswarm again this morning:

• country flags (based on Swarm membership) are displayed on the main page
• we can now autodiscover Upcoming feeds -- this was somewhat difficult before because they don't have an easy (i.e. non-API) way of converting account names into their numberic IDs.
• Tumblr is now autodiscovered
• A bug in parsing WordPress feeds has been fixed

We made another quick update to Onaswarm last night:

• "What is what" on your page should be a little clearer -- we've added the time to every posting and a small mouseover effect
• We detect when you attempt to add duplicate feeds and silently deal with it

We made a significant update to Onaswarm this morning. The update contains almost no new features, just updates to usabilty:

• the Administration page has been substantially simplified
• the "button exploding" effect is gone
• almost all button actions now grey the screen and display a waiting symbol
• all visual effects are programmed to happen faster (i.e. 100-200 ms) to make the site snappier
• a number of IE and Opera related bugs were fixed

As per usual, your feedback is always appreciated. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have suggestions,  bug reports or feedback.

We updated Onaswarm this morning.

• we added Digg as a recognized feed provider
• we added Digg and Del.icio.us (d'oh) to the list of feed providers we look up
• internally, we added feed specific filtering to remove a lot of junk Digg adds to feeds
• we improved the process for adding friends (a surprising amount of work)
• we improved the process for adding feed
• we improved the process for joining swarms
• we added the ability to change post dates and save posts as drafts
• we limit the number of similar entries shown in the standard summary view (I'm looking at you, Last.fm)
• many tiny tweaks and bug fixes

Nigel Pepper writes:

My friend Robbie recently blogged about his annoyance at people aggregating their blog posts with their del.icio.us links and other stuff. He then came across onaswarm a new service in beta which aggregates your feeds from flickr, del.icio.us twitter… wherever you have a feed really, and brings that all together in one. Wow. I hear you say. Wow. But this is really cool as it allows you to aggregate not only your feeds, but those of your friends (or a select few depending on your preference).

In a way, the appeal of this lifestream tool is not entirely dissimilar to that of twitter - bite-sized updates on your friends, now with extra stuff in the mix. Interesting how many people think of the same thing at the same time. I wonder how many other funky uber-aggregators are/were in the pipeline. Exciting times as developers continue to hack down the marketing bubble-crap which has surrounded your sources of interesting stuff/info.