A mark of a truly successful product is the fact that folks love it so much that they’ll unnecessarily begin hacking it up so they can extract every last drop of functionality from the service as is humanly (machine-ly?) possible. That is the case with the newly minted memetracker for creators of Google Reader powered linkblogs, ReadBurner. Found pre-maturely by Louis Gray, the site has seen a phenomenal growth pattern since it’s been launched.

Today, David Rothman posted a short primer on the different ways you can bend ReadBurner to your whims in churning out the type of data you’re looking to glean from folks’ link blogs:

The features I’d most like to see added are search and to have searches outputted as RSS feeds. I’ve had no luck getting ReadBurner to output the feeds I want, but I have managed to make it filter for just the stuff I want.

I really wanted a form so I could search and, for instance, see if any posts at this blog were being frequently shared. Sadly, no such search form exists at ReaderBurner.

Fortunately, we can make it search in a limited fashion even without a form by messing with the URL a bit.

He goes on to explain the bits of the URL interface, and ways to get it to display, for instance, items shared from a particular blog source:

So if we wanted to see items in ReadBurner that were shared from davidrothman.net, we just need to tack r=davidrothman.net onto the end of http://www.readburner.com/index.php? like so:
http://www.readburner.com/index.php?r=davidrothman.net

ReadBurner developer Alexander Marktl also gave some tips for getting other unique data from the feeds of the service by playing with the URL a bit, as well, such as examples on how to filter by language:

English Most Recent:
http://www.readburner.com/rss.php?s=mr&l=1

Asian Currently Popular:
http://www.readburner.com/rss.php?s=cp&l=2

Persian Most Recent:
http://www.readburner.com/rss.php?s=mr&l=3

..as well as examples on how to how to change the minimum share threshhold for an item to show up in a ReadBurner RSS feed:

The parameter also works for the RSS feeds. Here’s an example for Most Recent | English | min 3 shares

http://www.readburner.com/rss.php?s=mr&l=1&ms=3

It has been intriguing indeed to watch this service literally overnight spring from a set of scripts cobbled together into a useful Web 2.0 utility for finding stories relevant to our niche before they appear in any other aggregator. I won’t necessarily say this is the next Twitter, because the niche it serves is far more narrow, but this is a tool with a bright future ahead of it, with a clear ad hoc developer community forming around it.

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