Where the Idea Comes From

In 2008 I became very upset with Digg and it’s army of pro-Obama, voters that upvoted any article that was pro-Obama and constantly buried any article that showed Obama to be a double-talker, or displayed him making a error on facts.  A year or so later a big deal was made about the conservative movement that sought to upvote and anti-Obama articles and downvote any anti-republican articles.

Both of these actions were wrong. To me a site like Digg or Reddit works best people aren’t trying to game it for a particular political agenda.

The Solution

I needed to solve two problems with The Noows, I wanted to eliminate the ability for others to submit stories, and remove the ability to game the site.  The first one is easy to solve, and I did it by just relying on the RSS feeds from official news sources (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and eventually newspapers and such).  The idea was to remove the ability for people to submit their own articles, thus removing the need for them to game the site.

The second solution is currently two-fold. First, I rely on Facebook authentication for user creation and login. Since most people really only have one Facebook account, they can’t create multiple accounts on the site without also creating multiple Facebook accounts.  This (hopefully) makes it more trouble than it’s worth at the moment for a person to want to “game” the site to make sure certain articles are seen.

The second part of the solution is that there is currently no algorithm. You click the “Noows?” button, that article gets moved to the top of the homepage. Doesn’t matter if it’s already on the homepage or not, it gets bumped to the top.  The idea here is that the stuff a lot of people really think is news worthy will always be at the top of the site.  Will there eventually be an algorithm to determine what goes to the top? It’s possible, depends on what people want and if I ever see a real need for it.

Conclusion

Will the site ever be popular? Who knows. Really I just wanted to get it out there so people can start using it.  I think something that aggregates other news sites and brings stuff together in a way that allows everyone to see various articles on the same subject has value.  There might even be some value in a future feature that lets users decide on the left/right/center of particular articles.  But for the meantime, I hope that some of you can come to use it as a goto place to get your news fix.

The reason for the lack of OAuth and Search being complete is due mainly to 2 simple facts:

1. The search methods return types only come back in the JSON format, and my experience in parsing JSON pretty much non-existent.
2. I don’t understand OAuth enough to feel I can implement it correctly.  I’ll get to this eventually but it’s not overly necessary to do everyday Twitter stuff (update status, read friends timeline, etc)

Also, there is a wiki with some more information as well as some example code to get folks started, so be sure to check that out as well.

Again her are the links to the project and its wiki:  TwitterNET on Github & TwitterNET Wiki.

I’m hoping to see some forks and some user contributions, I currently have the project under the GPL 2.0, but  I’ll probably change this to a more friendly BSD style license in the future.

About a month back a close friend approached me about getting together and writing some mobile applications, specifically targeting the iPhone.  The plan came from a desire to learn a couple of new technologies and possibly make a little extra cash.  After some research and learning about the costs associated with starting iPhone development, we turn to looking to the Pre and Android platforms. We eventually settled on doing Android applications.

Why Android

So why did we choose Android? Two reasons

1. Cost of entry
2. Cross platform development ready

It cost zero dollars to start developing on the Amdroid platform. Ypu dont need a specific kind of computer, which means you dont have to buy a new computer to get started.

They also have an SDK download available for Windows, Linux, and OS X. Also, you can get up and running by downloading the Eclipse java development environment, which is also cross platform.

So we have a completely cross platform development kit allows for development on any of the major operatig systems, and allows you to get started immediately. No need to purchase a thousand dollar computer (assuming you don’t already own a Mac).

Lessons so Far

So far, in the last week and a half of messing with Android, I have learned that I like the overall idea of it.  I think there is a ton of potential in the platform.  People will argue that the iPhone apps are more popular, and that is true, but mainly it’s a numbers game.  Eventually there will be more Android devices than just the one and more people will begin to use devices with Android on them.

Also, I like the idea of Activities and Intents (two terms used in the Android world to define screens and actions).  It makes it very specific and the language itself makes it very easy to convey a thought in reference to an app.

Finally, Java, it’s been a while since I’ve done Java programming (we’re talking 1.2 version was new when I was developing in Java).  The C# language has been my environment for over 7 years now and going back to a Java way of thinking is taking some getting used to, but the internet helps a lot here.  However, it’s not so much a jump that it’s like learning a completely new language.  I’ll get better at it the more I code Java.

So expect to hear more from me about Android development as time progresses.

Website for my ShortenURL application is at: http://code.google.com/p/shortenurl-csharp/.

The website contains both a binary and source download.  Please feel free to submit patches, improvements, etc.  Or just download and use.

Here’s a screenshot:

The application is written in C# and is available under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPL).  Please feel free to download and give it a try.