What we had was:
3 people, 1 room, pens, paper (Low tech)
The Aim:
Each person was to come up with a way to rebuild Twitter as fast and as cheap as you can whilst retaining most of the features
The Results:
1. The first result was to build it from scratch using some existing php libraries.....blah blah - got put in the too hard basket really fast.
2. A result of Use something like Drupal and try to use the existing groups, identity, messaging work in there - still quite a bit of work and fiddling to get it working as a whole.
3. The winner - Use email!! (keep reading)
But wait, here is what we mean by use email : Just use a backend email server for it's built in functions and write an API on top of that. Still want more..
- A tweet is just a message = an email is just a message
- A tweet can to direct message to someone = just like an email going to an address
- A tweet can be replied to = just like an email (and it can even create conversation links with reply id's)
- A tweet can be sent to people who follow you = each email address has a group associated to it that they post too
- You can follow people = just get yourself added into a users group
- Twitter has APIs for developers types = you can just have standard pop3 / imap functions exposed.
- You can email into twitter = yeah umm...
So what else could this method bring...
- Well for a starter you could probably run it off Gmail / Yahoo Mail / Hotmail so you'd have no hosting costs
- Developers understand Mail systems and how to interact with them
- You could have premium private groups of twitter (like Yammer) so you could get an income.
Oh well, we just thought we'd share our thoughts on an exercise we did last week.
Would love to know your thoughts and / or if you have done other exercises around your workplace.
Regards,
The Team
