tigretigre.com

I recently opened some extra twitter accounts so that I could separate streams of messages for different audiences. Then I discovered what a PITA it is to manage said twitter accounts without logging out and logging in like a madman. So I figured I'd exercise my right as a developer to put together a tool for handling this, and why not make it easy to extend for other social networks as well. And make it work well on a mobile browser, like the one on my BlackBerry. And make it so that you can store login credentials on the client-side, so the server isn't as much of a target, nor does it have to have a big database. This is the mission I set myself to.

Now I know I'm not the first to attempt something of this sort. Ping.fm does some of this, but you can't have mulitple accounts at any given network. MATT and Splitweet are Twitter-focused apps along these lines. I have seen Web traces of a similar application called MultiTweet that tied in to Jaiku as well, but it seems to have disappeared some time in the past year. zembly.com is a new offering from Sun that could prove to be the platform I end up working with. But for now, I just want to try my hand at cranking out a simple PHP app to my own specifications.

In thinking about it some more, I have realized that it is a special case of Internet service aggregation. I purposefully say Internet and not Web because there are lots more ports than 80 and 443, and lots more protocols than HTTP. I realized that there is room for a whole ecosystem that SOAP and REST only scratch the surface of. So while I build my social network aggregator, I will be trying to lay the groundwork for a more general Internet service aggregation topology. More on that later...