Alex blogged about the casual development effort here at Big in Japan in three posts:
Check out the what, how and why about Egorcast. It was a fun little project mashingup Twitter, Jaiku, WordPress and Jott, hopefully you enjoyed it…
Posted by admin | April 27, 2007 - 4:50pm | 4 Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: egorcast, jaiku, jott, twitter
Nat Torkington wrote an interesting piece titled, "Six Basic Truths of Free APIs." He made six suggestions worthy of reprinting here:
- Free APIs are not a god-given right. Businesses offer them for their own self-interested reasons. If you build on top of the API but aren’t delivering the value for the business that provides the API, your use of the API will probably go away.
- If you build your own business on top of an API, you need a contractual relationship to ensure the service doesn’t get taken away from you. These generally cost money.
- If you find a way to get something from a site that isn’t explicitly offered as something for you to build on, your use of it will probably be fought unless you’re delivering value as in (1).
- he provider of your API will find it easier to implement services on top of their API than you will. Therefore you have to add something of your own that’s difficult to replicate, something beyond a simple UI tweak or a feature like "search", so that the business that provides the API doesn’t simply compete with you when you look like you’re succeeding.
- For these reasons, free APIs are a very poor substitute for having the source and the data and thus owning and controlling every piece of your application.
- For these reasons, there’s no such thing as a free API if you’re looking to build a business.
Posted by admin | April 27, 2007 - 4:41pm | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: api, free, oreillyradar
Everyone (including us) seems to be creating fun gadgets and mash-ups using Twitter’s API. Here is a list from the unofficial Twitter wiki:
- BBC News - Get BBC news headlines via twitter. Main news feed, and individual news channels available.
- EgorCast Now you can call in your Twitter posts. EgorCast is a mashup of Jott.com/Twitter/Jaiku.
- TweeTweeT! Now you can Twitter while watching live public Tweets as a cartoon. Finally.
- Twitterment is a Twitter search engine that also provides trend graphs and identifies buzzy and fading terms.
- MoniTwitter Monitors your website, posting updates to Twitter about load times and whether there is a problem or not. Subscribe to the Twitter account to receive updates about your site, notifications if it goes down.
- Twitterverse - a mashup and visualization project by Ideacodes which mines and archives the public timeline of Twitter and provides a visualization of the most commonly used words in a given time period.
- ServerMojo - free server monitoring system now with server status alerts sent via Twitter!
- Twitter Atlas - The twitter public timeline viewed in Atlas by Fresh Logic Studios updated every 5 seconds.
- twittermap - See current updates from Twitter users in a specific local area, and update your location in realtime by specifying L:21012 (or L: + any geocodable location) in a Twitter!
- dealtagger - Let all your friends know what your shopping for with the dealtagger > twitter update thingy!
- MyChores - Keep track of your household chores and send automatic Twitter posts whenever you complete a task!
- Manchester United News - Get Manchester United news straight to your mobile phone for free.
- GeoTwitter - This mashup uses Google Maps API and Twitter API. The most recent updates are fetched from the public timeline and mapped once every minute.
- Twitter Tube Tracker - find out when your public transport route isn’t running (London Underground and SF BART)
- twitterami - Use Frappr to see Twitter friends on a map.
- twittervision - Real-time display of the public Twitter stream on a map. Warning: dangerously addictive.
- Planypus, the place where friends make plans, now has twitter support! From any plan, click Post to Twitter to twitterize your plans
- Twitterholic: Top 100 Twitterers leaderboard.
- Twitter in 3D
- Twitter updates from Pluggd - Pluggd’s podcast player can automatically post updates to your twitter account… Let your friends know what you’re listening to!
- mibazaar - Current Twitter Posts on Google Maps
- Twitter Gadget - A Windows Vista Desktop Sidebar Gadget that helps you keep track of all the sweet tweets! Fetches tweets from twitter.com and updates them every 10 seconds.
- Twitter SpellCheck Bot - Lily program that lets you check the spelling of a word via Twitter.
- Twitget - a Twitter Gadget - This is a Windows Live gadget that can be hosted on live.com or on Spaces. On Spaces it shows your last tweet and on live.com you can use it to track up to 5 tweets from your friends.
- Twitter Planet - This is a Windows Live gadget that shows the Twitter public timeline overlaid on a Virtual Earth map. Can be hosted on live.com or Spaces.
- Viddler has some sweet Twitter integration allowing you to both syndicate your tweets to your account as well as post site updates to your Twitter account.
- Flitter: Flickr stream generated by the Twitter public timeline using this yahoo!pipe and rendered in vvvv.
Posted by admin | April 25, 2007 - 10:55pm | 12 Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: twitter
Our April ‘casual application’ (i.e. an application that can be built in less than a week) release is almost ready for primetime. We started coding the application on Friday and had our first release this evening (at DemoCampDallas2). It works for me, but it is not ready for primetime. Here is the scoop:
EgorCast™ is a simple web service designed to integrate the functionality of jott.com and social mo-blogging (mobile blogging) services such as Twitter.com and Jaiku.com. Jott allows users to dial a predetermined number and record a 15 second message. Jott then transcribes the message and emails the transcription to your phone or email account. EgorCast provides a gateway between the messages from Jott and social mo-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaiku (or both if you want). EgorCast will also send your messages to your WordPress blog with a specific category or tag.
Posted by admin | April 23, 2007 - 8:36pm | 10 Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: egorcast, jaiku, mashup, twitter
I was reviewing a number of our previous projects (some more successful than others) and was reminded of a post from Joshua Porter titled, "Seven Reasons Why Web Apps Fail." Joshua wrote the post almost a year ago and I thought it was worth repeating the reasons. Check out the full post here.
- Too focused on social instead of personal
- Try to do too much, or solve too many problems
- Working hard to make someone other than the user happy
- They sell it the wrong way (i.e. focused on Ajax, tags, web2.0, soa)
- Not built to last, exit strategy is too obvious
- They show too much of what’s going on, and get gamed
- Their underlying business strategy does not improve people’s lives
Posted by admin | April 21, 2007 - 4:41pm | No Comments
Category: Uncategorized | Tags: joshuaporter
