Scripting News: Twitter meets podcasting, day 2

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Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Twitter meets podcasting, day 2

Continuing yesterday's thread.

I'm now working on a web service that takes four parameters:

1. username (a string)

2. password (a string)

3. MP3 bits (base64-encoded binary)

4. metadata (a struct)

The username and password are for the user's Twitter account. This data passes through the web service, it is not retained. You have my word of honor on that.

The bits are the "gram" -- the official limit is 200K, but there's a little bit of grace. (We'll accept slightly more than 200K.)

The metadata is a struct that can contain fields that have the same names as an RSS 2.0 item, such as title, link, description, category, source, etc. Very much like the Metaweblog API. Not all the elements are acceptable, but ones that aren't are ignored. (For example, enclosure.) All are optional, as is the struct itself. The title, if present, is used in forming the Twitter post. The remaining elements are retained, and used to form feed(s).

The twits are also posted to a global Twitter account -- twitogram. (They don't allow accounts whose name begin with "twitter.")

The username and password must be valid for the MP3 to be retained.

The service returns a string, if successful, the URL where the gram is stored. (I'm using Amazon S3 for the storage, so it should be fairly reliable.)

There's a limit to the number of grams you can post over time. Not sure exactly what the limit will be. Maybe no more than one every ten minutes? Interested in people's opinion.

The ideal client for this service, it seems, is Flash, because it can do the MP3 recording and has XML-RPC support. I will also implement a RESTful interface.

Disclaimer #1: Who does he think he is? Just some guy. ";->"

Disclaimer #2: My mother loves me. (I think.)

More dislcaimers will follow.

Postscript #1: 29 hits today for TwitterGram.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:58 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

May Jul