I have one word for eBay: oAuth

The eBay feed is up. Currently, it supports notifications for BidReceived (seller), FeedbackReceived (buyers and sellers), ItemLost (buyer), ItemMarkedPaid (buyer), ItemMarkedShipped (buyer), ItemSold (sellers), ItemWon (buyers), ItemUnsold (seller), OutBid (buyers) and WatchedItemEndingSoon (buyer).

I may add support for dispute notifications later if people want it.

This has been by far the most convoluted, unnecessarily complex API I have worked with. Sooner or later these large sites will realise that 8 trillion pages of incoherent spaghetti documentation is not valuable to developers. Just give us a few, short, cohesive pages covering the major use cases and a wiki.

They should also give serious consideration to oAuth. Currently their procedure is as follows:

• Client obtains a session ID
• Client redirects to the eBay consent page
• Client retrieves the token using the session ID
• Client sets notification preferences using the token
• Client obtains a client alerts API token
• Client signs into the client alerts API and retrieves session values
• Client calls the API notification method using the session values

This is just absurd. Why not just use oAuth? It'ss simple, secure and widely supported.

eBay is another of those services that I don't use much, so please report any bugs. So far I've just been bidding small amounts on cheap items I don't want. I almost became the proud owner of a USB keyring shaped like a Nike sneaker.

MySpace

The MySpace feed is finished and seems to be working (after a lot of unnecessary work -- note to MySpace: providing the markup of event information in your activity stream feeds is not helpful).

I'm really more of a Facebook person so I'm not intimately familiar with the inner workings of MySpace. For those of you who use it on a daily basis, please try this feed out and let me know if you find any bugs.

I've almost finished the eBay feed too, hopefully it will be up by tomorrow.

Do you Yahoo?

I don't. Not that I have anything against Yahoo, I just don't really use any of their services. However, Alexa tells me more than a few of you use Yahoo Mail (I refuse to put an exclamation point after their name every time), so I've added it as a feed.

Please try it out. I've signed up for an account for testing, but you -- the users who use Yahoo Mail regularly - will be able to provide some valuable feedback.

Speaking of feedback, I've had a few minor bug reports. The green stream in the background doesn't tessalate for widescreen or very high resolutions (can't believe I didn't think of that).

I've also had some requests for Google Reader via our Get Satisfaction feedback page, but I may have to wait until they've released their API, which rumor has it should be very soon.

I'd also like to get the eBay feed working because I think the outbid and feedback notifications would be valuable, however eBay is another service I don't use much so it may be hard to test thoroughly.

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback and support over the past few days.

Thankyou

I've had some great feedback, including some excellent bug reports, all of which I've now resolved.

• Mobile version is now working correctly (or at least seems to be: I'm somewhat limited in how I can test this, but it works OK on my iPhone).
• Blurb on the front-page is no longer disappearing under IE6
• Made the thumbnail images marginally bigger
• There should now be a gap between the event title and description under IE6

I have, however, discovered that the Facebook feed doesn't show status updates which come from mobile devices unless you change the settings to allow application updates (the feed script examines the 'AppID' field of the Facebook API response to determine if the event was generated by an application - obviously Facebook Mobile is considered an application, so I'll need to add an exception rule, but not tonight).

I did quite a bit of work on the Yahoo Mail feed tonight, so it should be ready to go tomorrow or the day after.

It's been a whirlwind first day - more than 250 visitors so far, which is quite respectable considering I didn't do any advertising, with the exception of listing the site on KillerApps.

Please keep the bug reports coming.

Be gentle

My name is Cameron and I'm the developer of Timelimes.

I am also very nervous. This must be how engineers feel after constructing a bridge and watching cars drive over it for the first time. Did I remember to tighten those screws? Did I carry the 4 when calculating the load tolerance?

Albeit, if Timelimes crashes, people won't plunge into a river, but still...

I released this site and planned on having a few weeks of private beta to iron out any bugs. One thing led to another and before I knew it I had almost a hundred users in the first twelve hours. I'm heartened by the interest the site has generated, but I'm also slightly embarrassed by some bugs I've discovered in the last 24 hours.

So:

• If you're using IE6, there is no gap between the title of an event and it's description. I'll fix it tonight.
• The mobile version is having a few problems and is mostly unusable today.
• The blurb text on the front page disappears periodically on IE6. Not sure why, other than it's embarrassed to be seen in such a browser.
• I haven't done any IE8 testing, but (fingers crossed) it shouldn't differ too much from IE7.

I'm mostly relying on the users to report any problems they find (using the contact page) and to have patience.

You may have also noticed there are only five feeds, but the library is clearly set-up to accommodate more (search function, categories etc). These five are just the launch feeds - I'm currently working on an eBay feed (to notify you when you're outbid on items or feedback is left on your account etc), LinkedIn, YouTube and Yahoo Mail. Over time, I plan to add plenty more and eventually set up an API for developers to submit their own feeds.

I've had a few people ask for Hotmail, but to my knowledge, they don't support an open authorization protocol, which means Timelimes would need to store your Hotmail username and password for it to work. We just don't do that - it would be like painting a giant target on our backs for hackers.

At this early stage, I'd really appreciate feedback. We're collecting feedback via Get Satisfaction, but you can also use the contact page or post here.

Many thanks to everyone who has taken the time to join.