20080613

if a tree falls...

I've started playing around with twitter because I like the idea of jotting down little notes to stir up discussion points in bite size pieces ( each of which is actually 140 byte sized pieces, but I digress). That and I'm too lazy to update my blog much with interesting stuff

The problem is I don't have many friends reading my tweets ( though I prefer to call them twits since it's more fitting to the caliber of my posts), so my grand view of spurring the debate, or just publishing my status to groups of friends isn't working. In fact the way most people were getting my twits was through my facebook status updates which no longer functions thanks to twitter im being broken.

What I'd really like is for something like dodgeball to work, and while I'm wishing it'd be nice if it was seamlessly integrated withgoogle talk, my google contacts, google maps, and an rss feed I could embed ( or not) in my blog.

Also with all that metadata I'd love to have one giant database of posts which could be queried and displayed by ranges across maps, tag, timestamps, friend groups, etc. And if you could google earth animate it with little popup bubbles that'd be extra sweet. Imagine a trip journal like that. All you'd really need to carry in terms of data model would be



Header
  • timestamp
  • geocode
  • recipient list including predefined groups

Body
  • text content
  • multimedia attachment ( picture, audio, video)
So just a simple app on top of the existing mms infrastructure could carry all of this. You could also create an easy restful interface, and im bots for jabber, aim, and yahoo. Google has all the pieces to make it happen, but I bet it's a product management nightmare, especially since I haven't seen any new development on dodgeball in a while.