

Ask YC: reusable automated web tasklet system - tectonic

I'm thinking about starting an open source Ruby project and website for sharing and using automated, repeatable web tasklets, for lack of a better word.  This is sort of like Yahoo Pipes + Google Alerts for people who can express their desires in code.  Examples would include:<p>* Scan YC nightly and filter out stories with fewer than 20 points, or that match a list of exclusion keywords (for me: scheme, lisp, django, zed shaw, etc. - nothing personal), and email it to me or save a feed.<p>* Tell me when a new VPS offer shows up on lowendbox.com that matches my price, location, and size preferences.<p>* Ask 10 people on mechanical turk to check my website's UGC front page  each day for inappropriate comments.<p>* Buy a $1 item with free shipping on ebay each day and send it to me (yay xkcd!)<p>* Call me using Twilio every weekday at 8:10 if I should carry an umbrella.<p>These are almost mini-startup ideas, but I think it makes sense to have a mechanism to share and use them in a Ruby gems-esque way.<p>I'm very interested in your thoughts about this, and especially what sorts of tasks you might want to write and share.
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goodidea
I think this is an excellent idea, if done correctly. I think it's all too
easy for developers to make sharing sites for other developers. I can't quite
tell if you had this in mind, but I'd recommend actually providing a working
environment that allows for end-user lay-person single-signup and use.

Right now there are a number of different sites that have a single automated
tasklet each (one to search craigslist, one for amazon, etc). But you have to
sign up for each one individually to use them. If you can centralize that for
the noob AND allow for code-monkeys to post new tasklets, it would be awesome!
Make me a form of online "app store", and I'd definitely sign up. =)

Plus, if it becomes successful, ads would bring in $ and incentivize desired
high quality tasklets.

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thinkalone
Sounds like fun, and the "mini-startups" idea is intriguing, but I'm confused
on how it's different from something like Github, a central location where
people already write scripts and upload them for others to use or modify.
Would your server run the snippets of code that people upload? If so, I'm sure
you can anticipate the security concerns, plus, I don't want someone being
able to set up a tasklet to call _my_ phone every weekday at 8:10 ;)

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tectonic
I'm picturing something like the Rubygem system. You might do:

    
    
      gem install tasklets
      sudo tasklets setup
      tasklets install weather-alert
      tasklets --task weather-alert --configure zipcode=12345
    

Or something. With a central repo for the tasklets.

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thinkalone
Ah, ok, I'm not sure why I didn't realize it would be more repository-style,
haha.

In that case, how would it differ from Rubygem? Seems like many languages
already have package managers, but I'm not sure what the requirements are for
getting your code included, so maybe there's an opportunity there?

