Using Onaswarm.com or a solution to the Robbie Clutton problem

After some discussion on my previous entry (people do read my blog, cool), I'm happy to say that so far I'm pleased with onaswarm.com and the conversations coming from David Janes over there.

I tried out a few things which Cristiano wanted, like hosting the link in your own domain and building gadgets.

First, on my own (rarely used) home page I added an auto discovery RSS element, so the RSS icon appears in the address bar and points to my lifestream feed. I also added a new page to show just a gadget along with the auto discovery RSS feed. You could do similar things with a redirect straight to the feed, or use some XSLT to transform the feed to your own presentation.

As a lazy developer and human being, I had hoped someone had built something like this so I didn't need to. Thanks onaswarm, expect some feature requests from me in the future =)

Lifestreaming or the Robbie Clutton problem

With horror (ok delight really), I read about the "Robbie Clutton" problem on Simon's blog. It's interesting how a disgruntled post seems to get more traction, but hey ho.

Check out that post, then come back.

Ok, finished?

Good.

Something I've been thinking about recently is how to make lifestreaming easier for everyone. At the moment, I've seen blogs about doing that using Yahoo! Pipes, which is cool, but let's make it easier.

Any volunteers to help build a life stream site welcome =)

Show me the feeds

Why is it when I subscribe to certain feeds that people choose to only show a snippet of their post/article. I want to read that in my RSS reader, I don't want to have to go to your site. Especially when I'm offline and I've downloaded the feeds through Google Gears, I get no value from those sites and it bugs me. Stop it. If you want metrics, then use Feedburner or something. Show me the feeds!!!

Twitter for group messaging

As what usually happens, I'm sitting somewhere or doing something completely unconsiderate for writing ideas down when something strikes me. I'm sitting in the car this time, driving home from a co-location day in Milton Keynes. I start thinking about Jay Fresh being stuck on a train, in the nicest possible way of course, and how Twitter could be used for more purposes then one to one or one to many communications. Perhaps an application could use Twitter to update those who are interested in certain information.

My thougths evolved into different kinds of application uses for Twitter and so far I've come up with two. Firstly, an account for an application to use for the specific use of microblogging. After this thought I went and set up an account for Mojo, a project I have been involved in at work, so those interested could hear what Mojo had to say.

The second use is more detailed to an application than say, a group of developers such as the Mojo example. As a football fan, I'm always interested in the latest Arsenal score, but I don't follow them extensively and am often out and about when they play choosing instead to watch highlights. I had thought about building an application that could slurp feeds from relevant sporting sites and post those to Twitter using their API. Then using features such as follow, I could get those feed updates straight to my mobile.

Cool eh? Now I have to go write it =)