

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

I was thinking about writing a small application as a proof-of-concept.<p>The application will allow users to post one entry to multiple places on the net -- FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Wordpress or MoveableType blog, etc.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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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.

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DanielBMarkham
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.

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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.

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

