Re:Ask HN: Anybody Interested in Collaborating on a F# App?
by DanielBMarkham on Wednesday October 21, 2009 @11:17PM
(#896147)
I 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.
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.