Chris Bucchere, originally an east coaster, moved out to San Francisco grew up there and went to college. Out of college he took a job at Plum Tree who was thought of as the inventors of the Corporate Portal/Enterprise Portal.

Chris B. worked at Plum Tree for 4.5 years and left as a lead engineer. In 2002, Chris B. started his own Plum Tree consultancy called BDG doing deployments of the Plum Tree software. Plum Tree was eventually acquired by BEA and became BEA Aqua Logics.

Because BEA is moving into “Web 2.0”, BDG followed, built feedhaus and it is their first offering into the Web 2.0 space.

feedhaus is a socially powered news site powered by RSS and the most current news available. Oddly enough the concept of feedhaus was conceived from the need for Chris B. to converse with a friend that used the most current news as a conversation piece. Chris B. was often out of the loop on current news and the idea of feedhaus seemed to make sense.

The homepage of feedhaus is mostly constructed of a huge tag cloud, with each tag ranging in size based on the amount of news inside the tag. Chris Saylor commented on why 43 things was the biggest tag vs a Digg.com or other social news website, and Chris B’s reply, sarcastically, was “It’s a slow news day”, but quickly followed up with a mention that tags are larger or smaller based on the amount of news inside of each tag and that 43 things has items constantly being added to their feed.

Because of the amount of AJAX requests required to have the interface of feedhaus always updated with the latest from each feed, the conversation turned to AJAX and API requests and the recent news of Twitter having to separate their API server from their main web server. On the note AJAX and APIs, Chris B mentioned the planned feedhaus API, with each tag having their own feed as well as the homepage having is own feed. Sounds like an all out feed-frenzy!

Some of the architecture of feedhaus was discussed regarding why Chris B. choose the pull method vs the push method to aggregate the data in the RSS feeds that feedhaus uses to power its service. Chris B. detailed that he wanted the world to tell him what the important feeds were rather than deciding for the world that he should just pull technoratti feeds or pingomatic, or Syndic8. Chris B. also went on the detail the difference of feedhaus between the likes of tailrank or technoratti, and also the planned social features such as My feedhaus where you can create, share, and copy groups of tags clouds you create or others create.

(Sphinx was mentioned as a possible solution for site search when Chris S. broke the site while trying to add The Web 2.0 Show’s RSS feed. Later on in the show another attempt was made and it broke gain because of http not being added to the begining of the URL, which is fine because feedhaus was in alpha at the time of the interview recording.

Originally feedhaus was written in Ruby using Ruby on Rails, but after hitting a wall after not being to find a mature robust feedparser written in Ruby Chris B. turned to Java (just straight Java no J2EE) (Around 200 hours) for the backend written on Apache Tomcat and MySQL. Chris B. also gave a BIG shout out to the ROME FeedParser developers because it is what made feedhaus possible—All feeds lead to ROME!

UI, AJAX and good user experience was discussed as popular aspects of what Web 2.0 is about. The UI of feedhaus was carefully designed with features such as looking at the users to see if the name chosen at sign up is available.

For the record, feedhaus is not in need of funding. A half of a persons time could be used, but most of the features planned for the service can be done by existing developers on Chris’s team. Instead they will be using Google’s Adsense to generate income with future plans of other ad space to be sold.

Hosting was mentioned, Linode got a plug, as well as GoDaddy hosting, the current host of feedhaus, (and of course the GoDaddy girls).