Ask HN: Anybody Interested in Collaborating on a F# App?
The application will allow users to post one entry to multiple places on the net -- FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Wordpress or MoveableType blog, etc.
After posting, the app goes back to each place and catches all the replies and puts them in a place of the user's choosing -- perhaps as comments on his blog, perhaps as just a list in the app, perhaps as comments on FaceBook, perhaps as tweets to his phone, etc.
So it's kind of a switchboard where users can both post and track entries without having to visit dozens of "channels" on the web. I guess you could call it a poor man's wave.
Right now I'm thinking it will be a Win32 F# app. I'd like to make it a webapp, but I think screen-scraping is much more legal when done from the user's computer instead of a centralized service.
Anybody interested in doing some F# work over the next month or two? Let me know. I don't see any reason several of us couldn't collaborate over the net on this.
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.
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.
There are also a number of others like PeopleBrowsr, SocialThing (bought by AOL now AOL lifestream), Threadsy, EventBox and Ping.fm (for posting) that are trying it.