Beautiful Pixel

I’ve been working on an iPhone application for the community of Shacknews.com. It’s an app that allows access to the comments areas that are attached to the news stories. Simple enough, but I ran into the problem in that the site had no API.

I started to examine the tools I had in the iPhone frameworks to parse html content. It quickly became a chore. Hpricot has spoiled me. So I did what any Rails developer would do: I wrote a small Rails webservice to scrape the HTML, and return organized semantic XML. This stuff was much easier to parse on the iPhone.

I told the community of my progress on the iPhone app, and they were excited. As a minor aside, I also informed them that the API was open for whatever anyone else wanted to do with it.

This is when something magical happened. I didn’t think much would come from the API, other than me being able to use it for the iPhone app. But almost overnight, there were a multiple projects being cooked up by some tech savvy members. Very quickly they began to release their work. Suddenly it felt like a mini renaissance as the community interaction began to spread like a virus into new domains. Suddenly, you can post from the beach with ease, or report the score of a sports game to your buddies from your seat in the bleachers. Or you can post from work via a command line terminal that doesn’t look like your wasting time posting about video games as your boss walks by.

When you have an API, you give the community a way to improve your offering for you. And the best thing is, people do it for FREE, because they want to. You can pay some developer to make an iPhone app for you, or you can have an API and let someone else decide to do it for free. Overall, community participation is up, because people can do it easier, and in more situations. As a result, you get more traffic, and more importantly, more user activity in your site.

There are lots of smart people out there. Give them the chance to make cool stuff for you, and if they are passionate about your site, they will. And you will reap the benefits.

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After a week or so of the API being available, this is list of ways you can now participate in the community beyond a computer based web browser.

(List compiled by a community member)

LatestChatty.app

Pros:

• Best UI and features

Cons:

• iPhone only

LatestChatty Command Line App

For Windows 3.11 and later, a command line interface. This is probably the most impressive, to be honest.

Pros:

• 36K!
• Work safe!

Cons:

• Code will probably make your head hurt when he releases it
• Probably not going to display images any time soon

LatestChatty for Windows Mobile

Why does the iPhone get to have all the mobile fun?

Pros:

• Makes Windows Mobile slightly less embarrassing to own

Cons:

• Fairly feature light at this point – color-coding of tagged posts would be nice
• Navigation is not the best

2 mobile optimized web apps for mobile browsers

Why does the iPhone get to have all the mobile fun?

Pros:

• Nothing to install
• Works broadly on small screen sizes

Cons:

• Less powerful UI and features than a native mobile app.