Many of today successful startup stories are totally different from first iterations. Twitter, Facebook are most popular examples and we can name more recent stories like Flowtown, Seesmic or others. These startups have been listening to user behavior, have stripped all unnecessary feartures and kept on iterating.
Lesson, here : It's all about pivoting.
Goal: Today we all live in time of "near" realtime data. Web is entering towards 3.0. Informations keep flowing thowards us at fast pace and was asking myself: Can I push instaright thowards realtime? Can I eliminate messaging latency and get closer to user?
As I've created instaright backend on top of the Google App Engine, I've been noticing that Google has tactics of creating APIs but not exposing it to public. Ie, Channel API has been available on GAE 1.3.7, but it has not been pushed to public. This effecient way of letting users test ready product and discover possible hickups. One can fully test Channel API localy, but can push app to public. It is pretty neat and ubber smart move by Google. This topic deserves separate blog post.
Channel API creates comet channel between sever and client and pushes messages from server to client, providing realtime message updates. This API is complement with Pubsubhubbub, which notifes callback url of latest feed updates.
Enough of Geeky stuff. Overall result is instaright.appspot.com - Instaright Stream Updates. Instaright bookmarks of Instaright Users presented as stream of articles. Something, like Twitter for Bookmarks.
On right side, If you are interested in certain topic or domain , you can subscribe to them by sending invite to your jabber account by providing jid and pressing enter.
More info on using XMPP updates in upcoming post, which will be entirely dedicates to Instaright XMPP updates.
In order to get picture of what is going on Instaright, check Instaright stats page, including daily, weekly, stats per city and per country (thanks to all Japan users :), daily article volume. Check out more info in blog post regarded to Instaright Domain Stats.
Let's repeat once more it is all about pivoting and listening users, which means that this is not final version and that both instaright.appspot.com and instaright addon will keep on iterating.
Instaright Firefox addon for Instapaper
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