Ask HN: Anybody Interested in Collaborating on a F# App?

[DanielBMarkham]

I was thinking about writing a small application as a proof-of-concept.

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.

[mdemare]

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 → mdemare]

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.

[rythie]

We have been doing this for a while at http://friendbinder.com

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.

[schindyguy → rythie]

I dont think thats what he is talking about... and I would put a video demo on your site right where the pic is...