MyDreamApp disappointments and Hijack
After five grueling rounds, the MDA winners have been announced. Let the development begin!
Spoiler alert - the winners are Cookbook, Portal, and Atmosphere. Pretty disappointing, since my faves were Hijack, Whistler, and Desktop Wars. Of course, I didn't do anything other than vote and occasionally forum-lurk.
Which, matter of fact, is why Hijack was my top favorite of all. I've gotten a lot of read-only coverage of the web from my news aggregator, but I've never ever been able to get into web-distributed forum groups. Some have RSS feeds, but most don't and I never remember to revisit them. I love the power of the web, and I love distributed apps - but sometimes I miss Usenet.
Seems like there's a need for Atom-ized comments - that is, a data format for forum aggregators to read and an API for reply submission with spam resistance. Hijack featured forum HTML scraping as a proposed feature - but what if you could get adoption for some simple plugins for Wordpress, phpBB, Vanilla, etal? co.mments seemed promising, but I've just not gotten into it much. I need to do some poking around to see who is already working on this.
Archived Comments
It's funny; a week ago, something set me off on writing a "Why do we not have forum aggregators?!" post, and then a bit of googling led me to Hijack, and then the massive disappointment last night that it lost.
And then this morning, I was just thinking that it'd be easily doable in Atom.
I need to stop thinking in other people's blog posts.
(If you do get going on this, let me know.)
This should be a pretty trivial job of stringing together the APP and Atom Threading (RFC 4685).
(Hmm, where did your AJAX preview button go? I hope the Markdown links are interpreted properly…)