Kevin Burton, previously spotted writing a feedparser for Apache and standing behind NewsMonster, has announced that TailRank, a type of aggregator, has released an new version of its API - Spinn3r - which allows near real-time access to a monstrous set of blog content through the use of a simple client package. With Spinn3r, you have access to TailRank's blog feeds. To access them, you use a Config object (containing information like vendor name, feed type, language, and various other features, and then ask a Client implementation to retrieve a list of items. The information you get is fairly complete: url, content, tags, title, etc. A spinn3r account, then, looks like it'd be able to replace feed parsers entirely. Why use Rome to read feeds, when submitting a feed to TailRank can do autodiscovery of the syndication urls for you, and Spinn3r provides a common API where you don't need subclasses for the various syndication formats? (Answer: not only can you use Rome to create feeds, but if you actually do need format-specific data from feeds, Rome's probably the way to go.) Spinn3r is surprisingly fast, and exceptionally simple to use; one client of TailRank was able to implement a client in under two hours, and by all examinations, that client must have taken a long lunch between starting and ending.