Scripting News

Tonight's message

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 02:06:25 GMT

Find out about tonight's dinner by listening to my latest TwitterGram.

Always a quickie, guaranteed to be 200K or less. A bite-size podcast.

BTW, the blogger whose name escaped me is Berkeley neighbor Scott Rosenberg.

Does Peter have an iPhone? We'll let you know.

You can spy on the festivities through the KitchenCam!

River of News everywhere, now, please

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 19:27:10 GMT

AOL embraces River of News. Why doesn't everyone else just go ahead and do it too. Think about it. When you want news, you want the new stuff, you don't want to wade through sections looking for the new stuff. You want the computer to find it for you. Too many electronic news sites are patterned after newspapers, that published once a day. In the real world of today, news is published all the time. Might as well get used to it, it's not going to change. Oh the insanity of the Apple iPhone ads. They show the user panning over the NY Times website front page and it looks like paper news. What a joke. 25 years from now today's kids will look at that as the definition of insane.

John Dvorak: "This is so easy that I'm going insane!"

Glenn Fleishman: "The iPhone has a very small screen compared to even the tiniest laptop."

TwitterGram, Day 4

Garrick Van Buren has the first client for the TwitterGram web service, written in AppleScript, for Audio Hijack Pro.

I'm working on a website that connects up to the web service. Slowly at first, the bootstrap begins.

Today's links

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:36:17 GMT

Uncov: "Ikan is a barcode scanner that you use to scan the empty packages of shit when you throw it out so you know to buy more. It's got some web integration thing so it will e-mail you a shopping list. It will even send your list to an online grocer!"

Les Orchard: "If I were Scoble, and I read this, my immediate response would be to write a nice, long essay on arm farting."

NakedJen: "I'm going to keep wearing my seatbelt."

We're getting close

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:40:19 GMT

Paolo writes about open relationship standards.

In the last couple of days I've written, debugged and refined a web service that does TwitterGrams. It builds on Twitter's identity system, much the way I imagine I'd build off an open identity system. That is to say that Twitter is almost everything I'd want from an open identity system. But not everything. I have a feeling that Mike Graves is nodding as he reads this, and I believe he knows what the missing piece is. And it's one that Twitter (or anyone else) could add, almost trivially.

What's missing: The ability for any app to store information associated with an account. Each person defines a namespace that can connect up to any other person with a namespace. At the intersection between two users could be (I'm channeling Marc Canter here) an appointment, a photograph (or many), a movie, a weblog, you name it. Marc could decide that this post belongs in his namespace in addition to mine (where the original lives). That's what the permalink is for.

Are we close? Yes we are. The API for TwitterGrams borrows a key idea from the MetaWeblog API, that a RSS item can hitch a ride with every bit that travels over the pipe. There's the metadata. David Weinberger should be happy.

BTW, the connection to Twitter's identity system is simplicity itself. They do nice work over there. Thanks!