Hey All,
I've been messing around trying to create a social network aggregater for a while and I recently came across http://lifestream.aol.com/ and realized I'm going about it all wrong. For facebook, for example, I was using fql queries and the like to literally pull on a bunch of content and save it into my own databases etc; but this is cumbersome and slow. When I look at aol lifestream it seems that nothing like this is happening; more like the service is somehow accessing and displaying the facebook content without actually storing it at all. Even so, it somehow mashes them together in a seamless way. What I mean is; if I search for "test" on lifestream it will show a bunch of facebook posts that have the word "test" in it, and also a bunch of twitter posts with the word "test" in it; but it actually knows to render them interspersed based on the timestamp; not just in separate blocks for facebook or twitter.... So even though the data isn't captured and stored by lifestream, it somehow creates and sortable "whole" from all the services.
I would much rather do something like this than what I am doing, but I am sort of a newbie and can't find any information on how to do things like this. Is there a nice sample project somewhere of a social aggregator that behaves like lifestream in this way and also has an easy system of "hooking" in various social networks (also like lifestream)? I know this is broad question but I would appreciate any help you could offer. The languages I am most comfortable with are PHP and Coldfusion, by the way, but I'm sure AJAX is likely involved. Thanks again.