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That sounds very interesting. I guess you'd need some kind of abstraction layer to bridge the app and the individual websites, with one implementation for each
by mdemare 17y ago
That sounds very interesting. I guess you'd need some kind of abstraction layer to bridge the app and the individual websites, with one implementation for each community.
What would that API look like? getListOfTopics, getListOfCommentsForTopic, and submitCommentToTopic are the primary methods, I guess.
But some forums have hierarchical topic-trees, some sites have nested comments, some sites are so high profile that you'd need some kind of filtering, etc.
I can't think of any abstraction layer that would work for both Twitter, Google Groups and StackOverflow.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoI don't think the abstraction layer needs to be tough at all. To make things simpler, you'd only tackle a small problem first, then incrementally move towards the uber-app. For instance, as a first pass, you'd just allow the user to post to various services and retrieve comments on their post in one place. So you'd have getPostLength, postMessage, and getReplies I think that'd be about it. Ideally you'd have a meta-language that described how to find things on each service. I've already done some work with that as part of another project, so I know it's workable. Like I said, this is so easy a caveman could do it, which leads me to think that the gnarly part of the problems lie somewhere else besides the technology -- perhaps finding the right initial niche for growth or dealing with lawyers from the social sites.