uBlogge

Twitter is a fun little application / service that I've been using for a while, but there's something about it that's always bugged me. That all the traffic is funnelled through a single site. Now, granted, the site has lots of functionality over and above just the raw sending and receiving of messages: SMS support, IM support, friending/community support, etc. But the raw message sending and receiving is pretty basic, and can be replicated easy with off-the-shelf software.

One piece of software that's well suited for the messaging is blogging software. Twitter is often described as 'micro-blogging'. Why not just use real blogging software to do this?

So that's the basic idea for uBlogge. As an additional innovation, I'll drop the final 'r' and keep the 'e'. I'm pissed about not patenting the 'no last e' thing anyway; I have 20+ years of prior art there. Buy me a beer, I'll tell you the story.

There is no special server software. The server is your blog, or probably a new blog you should set up specifically for you to micro-blog at. uBlogge is purely a client tool to read and post messages.

First attempts will be at building the client using Adobe AIR, using the HTML/JS route, vs going the Flex route. I don't have the strength to learn another widget library, and it would break my heart to apply strong typing to JavaScript. Start with just a reader, once that's functional, add the writer.

Stuff like community, SMS, IM support ... well, I'll let you work on that.

One of the cool things is that, since Twitter already makes messages available via Atom, uBlogger should automagically be able to read everything I read with Twitter anyway. Maybe I'll miss less messages that way. Of course, it's unfortunate that the feed doesn't validate (or didn't when I wrote this).

Updates

2007/10/26

Created.