Twitter Blog: Think Globally, Tweet Locally
"In August [2009] we announced that we were working on a new API that would provide developers with the ability to geotag tweets. Today, the Geotagging API is officially available.
This release is unique in that it's API-only which means you won't see any changes on twitter.com, yet. Instead, Twitter applications like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and others are already supporting this new functionality (go try them out now!) in interesting ways that include geotagging your tweets and displaying the location from where a tweet was posted. The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations. Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall. These are only the beginning and we are really looking forward to seeing the creative uses emerge from the developer community.
It's important to note geotagging is disabled by default for all users which means you will need to opt-in in order to use it. To activate the new geotagging functionality, go to your Settings page and click 'Enable Geotagging'."
(Twitter.com, 19 November 2009)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Google Buzz: more sharing and integrating through Gmail
"Google Buzz ...automatically brings social networking into Gmail and the rest of the Google-sphere. Whether or not you're big on social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook, Buzz offers a somewhat new and intriguing approach."
(Adam Pash, 9 February 2010, Lifehacker)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The World Wide Web is a hypermedia application
"The World Wide Web is a hypermedia application, not just a collection of specifications. Again, our software development training doesn't help us here very much. Good ol' functional decomposition makes us (well, me at least) want to see the Web as HTTP (RFC 2616), URIs (RFC 3986), MIME types (Wikipedia entry to set of related RFCs), HTML/XHTML (W3C markup specifications) and HTML forms (W3C recommendation and RFC 2388).
In actual fact, it's all of those working together to provide, as Eric [Newcomer] said, the Web as a distributed hypermedia application (which, if I remember correctly is a point also made by Roy Fielding himself in the dissertation). The Web works because both user agents (browsers) and the server applications use all of these specifications together to expose a set of functionality to the interactive user. There is no a priori agreement between the browser and the Web server as to how the information service built on these specifications used, but because of agreement on how these specifications are used together, as an application, it doesn't matter if today, CNN.com is built using Microsoft ASP, and tomorrow it's built on PHP. Apart from the application of the 'Cool URIs Don't Change' principle, if a user starts from , they will always be able to utilize the CNN news service via their browser's implementation of those specifications and the implicit agreement of CNN to publish its service in accordance with them too.
...
A hypermedia application such as Atom or RSS and content negotiation via MIME types, HTTP accept headers and embedded tags mean that this sort of evolution could happen without breaking the client—provided there is agreement on the application semantics of how those things should be both used and interpreted between clients and servers. Anything else means you're back to brittle, API based systems that can no longer evolve independently of each other."
(Andrew Townley, 16th December 2006)
[Andrew Townley attempts to re-emphasise the significance of the Internet as a hypermedia system. He does so as a criticism of what be believes is the conventional logic of programming which by extension is preoccupied with the development of APIs. So despite the immediate value of the REST API for enabling interaction with services by sites such as Delicious.com such efforts only conceal the real value of the Internet as a generalised, flexible and interoperable system.]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
PhpDelicious : wrapper for the del.icio.us API
"PhpDelicious is a PHP 5 library for accessing the del.icio.us API. It combines data from the main REST and JSON APIs and presents a consolidated interface. It also implements a file based caching system which eliminates the need to query on every request and ensures access to the API won't be throttled due to excessive requests."
(Ed Eliot)
[Through implementing this PHP 5 library bookmarks can be implicitly published to an existing delicious account i.e. published without first needing to navigate to your page on the delicious.com web site.]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
