Apparently, Mr. Pulver has found Twitter. Twitter is a pretty cool application. You can send it text messages, which it aggregates and sends to other people on your buddy list. The main application is active presence, as in, "I'm jumping on a plane" or "Sad because I'm a Celtics fan." Others who are in your group receive these messages on their cell phones when you send your message out. You can update your presence through IM, SMS or on the web page. Personally, I've had some problems updating my presence through IM, but maybe it's me. In his blog, Jeff says he likes the service, but says that it's a bit chatty. And of course it is... if you have ten friends that update their presence a few times a day... that's a lot texting going on.
So, as a help to Jeff, let me suggest a mashup for him. Instead of continuously getting feedback, why don't you setup a system where you can ask to see what Jonathan is doing by texting his feed.
It's pretty straightforward : Twitter has an API that allows you to take the data from your friends as an XML or JSON feed. Give that XML feed into a custom keyword at 411 sync. Let's call it "twitter_pull" Then, if you want to know what your friends are doing, just text "twitter_pull jonathan", and you'll get back the Twitter data of your friend. You could probably get really complicated and use Yahoo! Pipes to do the consolidation, but that's for another day, I suppose.
5 cents, please.
3 comments:
sounds like a sound thing to try. :)
We love mashups! This one might be overkill, though - we have a keyword "get" that allows you to get the most recent update from any of your friends (e.g., "get jeffpulver"), or from all of your friends that have updated in the last 6 hours ("get"). Combine that with turning notifications off for your friends, or only receiving updates via IM, and I think it might do-what-you-want.
If it doesn't, feel free to mashup! :-)
We're working to improve our APIs (and our documentation!), but if there's anything you're having problems with, just ping us and we'll be happy to help.
Hey - that would probably work!
Let me tell you one of the really exciting twitter things for me - I love how easy it is to take my input about my presence and stick it into any Web flow that I could mash up. For instance, I'm setting my plumber friend up with a twitter account for him and all of his service men. I take key words out of it, and use it to drive indications into the billing and parts department. It's all very cool.
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