Error 999: Using Feedburner RSS Feeds for your Yahoo Pipes

I have a couple of RSS feeds which are a mashup of multiple RSS feeds using Yahoo Pipes, and to be able to track their usage I utilize Feedburner. But lately all of these Feedburner feeds were not updating.  Feedburner returned “Error getting URL: 999 – Unknown” with HTTP Error code 502, though the Yahoo! pipes source feed was valid RSS (even using the recommended services listed over on the pages of feedburner).

This happened after the migration of Feedburner accounts to Google accounts and the recent redirects to feeds2.feedburner.com urls.

All attempts troubleshooting feedburner failed (incl. to resync the feed). In case you recently created a Feedburner feed which sources Yahoo Pipes -> check if it is working.

Update: DON’T move your Feedburner feeds to Google accounts if the original source is Yahoo Pipes:

If you use Yahoo! Pipes as the “Original Feed,” or content source, for one or more FeedBurner feeds, and you haven’t already moved over to a Google Account, please postpone moving it (for now).

We are working directly with Yahoo! to restore Google-hosted feeds’ access to Pipes as soon as possible, but until this fix is in place, FeedBurner feeds with Pipes sources moved to Google will stop working properly.

Update 2: As of today (Feb. 1, 2009 – Sun.) the feeds seem to have re-started to work as normal. No post/news yet on the official Feedburner Blog.

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Web Programming: Data Portability – Gnip & OpenSocial

Data portability is a topic which is becoming more and more important, prominent example is OpenSocial from Google. OpenSocial allows you to build apps/widgets for many big social networks out there, based on one API (OpenSocial). This helps the developer of an app to make it available for all supported platforms without the need to re-write it for every social network/online community out there.

A different approach is the one from Gnip. They want to act as a data stream coverter, providing you with data from many services in the format most appropriate for your app. Below you find the services offered by them (or what they will offer soon):

Gnip Notifications Data Consumers: Poll for new data the moment it exists. Avoid throttling & decrease latency from hours to seconds.
Data Providers: Reduce API traffic by an order of magnitude while increasing distribution through aggregators.
Gnip Polling (soon) Offload API and RSS polling to Gnip and receive full content updates via your preferred protocol (REST, XMPP, ATOM, etc).
Gnip Transformation (soon) Receive standardized cross-service XML markup and turn integrating with new APIs into a plug-and-play experience.
Gnip Identification (soon) Let Gnip offer suggestions for your users’ profiles through a variety of identity discovery mechanisms.

This is an basic overview of their service (from Gnip’s site):

They support many well known services, in which data streams you can hook into as an application developer, among them are e.g. MyBlogLog, Flickr, Identi.ca, Twitter, etc.

Chem them out at gnipcentral. Do you have some experience with this service or are you thinking about using it? Let us know and leave a comment.

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