The fantastic folks over at Feedburner announced this morning that they have released a complete version of their API (application programming interface) so that programmers can go nuts creating new features that anyone can plug into their Feedburner republished RSS feed.

Originally made up only of in house developed features, the company's "feed flare" service already allows you to add things like a list of who's linking to a particular item in your feed via Technorati,  a list of the tags readers have applied to the item in del.icio.us or a one click button to add the item to del.icio.us.  If you have a Word Press blog then there's an option to include the number of comments made to each item in the information that's viewable in your feed.  All of this information appears automatically in reader's rss aggregators once the publishers (bloggers) have activated the features in Feedburner.

Today they are throwing the doors open and inviting developers to create new features all together.  I for one am very excited to see what kinds of features I couldn't even imagine will soon become possible.  Just to get things rolling, the company has posted 101 ideas of features that could be developed.  What sorts of things could you imagine being added to your feeds for readers?  Here's my first idea:  add an option to receive IM notification of updates to the feed. 

This announcement was made at the super-hip "Future of Web Apps" conference in London.  All the participants there are sure to be worth watching.