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Casual Development Part I: Egorcast

April 25, 2007

THE WHAT: 

egorcast draftThe Big in Japan team has been super busy with paying work lately.  We have revamped most of our free tools (moving from hosted services to sourcecode releases) and we haven’t really worked on a public application since.  Last week I got the team together and we talked about what sort of ’side’ projects they were interested in working on.  We also talked about some guidelines for acceptable ’side’ projects:

  • The application should build on the efforts of others, i.e. using one or more APIs
  • The application should require less than a week of coding
  • The application should be fun, simple and easy to understand

Using the whiteboard we listed a number of ideas.  We made a decision that each month we would pick one of these ideas and build it around our paying work.  The first idea was VERY simple and the guys got started building last Friday.  Everyone has been talking about Twitter since SXSW.  For those of you who don’t know what Twitter is I recommend the Wikipedia entry.  Internally we were intrigued by Jott’s transcription service (you dial a number, record a message and in a few minutes someone transcribes it and emails it to you).  The cool feature offered by Twitter is the ability to SMS messages to Twitter while you are on the go - i.e. that is why they call it mo-blogging (mobile blogging).  What if you hate typing on your cell phone?  How about being able to record a message that would then show up on Twitter?  Our idea was to mash-up Jott’s transcription service with Twitter using their API.  We decided to call our little application Egorcast.

The idea met our requirements: a) It used Twitter’s API and used Jott’s service, b) we could build it in less than three days, c) and we thought it would be fun (it was/is). 

My next post will describe THE HOW. . . 

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog 

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