Who You Calling A Jesse?

We have been sputtering along a bit recently between vacations, newly acquired meetings, and other things here and here but UW Chatter (twitter clone) is still moving along with an eye for a stable ‘production’ launch in September. Starting soon UW’s Housing and Residences will make an effort to push out content via Chatter and we will see how it goes. So what is left besides bug fixes? Well an API.

I would like to see Chatter act as a communication hub for web applications on campus in much the same way Kiwi can be an authentication hub. A simple messaging API is easy enough but how one that:

• handles what group you want to post to remotely
• send direct private messages to one or more people (if their preferences allow)
• control your preferences for that particular application outside of Chatter and have that application honour your notification settings in Chatter

It starts to get complicated but Bobby and I have had some pretty good conversations about it. The issues of what to use (XML-RPC, SOAP, etc) with an eye fixated on REST is making this a little more focused but really it’s all on the table. How do we manage this?

Well we do have an idea ;) That will be another post next week… for now I am curious what people think need to be in an API for any web application never mind a twitter clone. A note on comments, I am on the road so approving them might be slow.