Friendfeed is an excellent life streaming service aggregating all your feeds from different service providers, compile them together, build a social network among your known people and finally deliver all these feeds as a mashup. [...] In this blog post I will try to focus on how to develop such a service like Friendfeed using PHP and JS and how to scale such a huge load successfully.

This first part looks at the photo sharing handling of the application, including links to libraries already written in PHP to connect to them (like Flickr and Smugmug).

The recent Zend Framework 1.0.3 release includes new support for some great services, including Picasa Web Albums, YouTube, and Google Documents List.

He talks about the interfaces for each of these (including what you can grab) and includes some pointers to example code that can be used with either the full framework or just the GData bundle. There's also a video demo of the component being used to fetch data from the Data API.

Got bored this weekend and decided to play around with Picasa Web Albums. After a little poking around, found the protocol was pretty basic and decided to see what could be done with it. The first thing I decided to do was to reimplement the "client side" functionality.

You can get a list of albums (including album meta information), a list of photos in an album (including image meta info), have the ability to create new albums, and the ability to upload images to your online gallery.

He also mentions the next step in the process he's developing - a proxy server that will allow uploads from Picasa out to either Flickr, Y! Photos, or Gallery. You can get the code here.