andyhume.net

A few people at Hackday presented hacks that use Twitter’s direct messaging API to interface with a third party Web Service. By far the coolest one was Colm and Richard’s that allows you to request data from eBay and Wikipedia as well as a host of useful information such as nearest cashpoints, cinemas, tubes, restaurants and many others.

Want an example? How about being able to text to Twitter closest atm from ec4a2dy, and get back a set of walking instructions for finding the nearest cashpoint. Pretty handy I would argue.

Want to know if there’s anything interesting round about? Try sending closest wikipedia from rome, italy and that should keep you going for a bit.

FireEagle

The hackday bot (not currently available for public use) uses Yahoo!’s FireEagle service to find out your current location so that you don’t have to send it to Twitter every time. This means if you can set up your GPS device or mobile to ping FireEagle your location every minute or so, you’ll never have to worry about where you are and what is around you again. You’ll simply text to closest pub, FireEagle will know where you are, let Multimap know so they can query their local information database and Twitter will send you back what you need. This is pretty astounding really, and I don’t know of another service right now that can offer quite the same kind of thing.

In my opinion FireEagle has some serious implications for the way location based services are going to work in the future, and I think what the guys built at hackday is an early prototype of what may be round the corner.

For added comedy value they also created a spoof iPhone ad to show off the Twitterbot in action. Is there no end to their creative genius?

It’s been a couple of days since hackday now, and I want to record my version of it. In summary it was the most fantastic weekend I could ever have hoped for. I had a feeling I would enjoy it, but it exceeded every expectation in every way.

And it was bloody hard work.

When Richard mentioned he had an idea for a hack that he wanted to do, I suggested we build it in Django. In hindsight that was a bit of hideous error, because it meant we didn’t have as many programmers at our disposal as we would if we’d chosen PHP. In fact, it meant we had me. And I’m not really a proper programmer. It was about 2am in the morning when I realised I might have bitten off more than I could chew, and that 2 hours was about as much sleep as I was going to get that night.

In the end we just about got away with it, and it allowed Rich to create a really fantastic UI and prepare a succinct presentation that really nailed the essence of what the app was all about.

Anyway, our hack was just one miniscule part of the whole experience. I’ve many memories and emotions from that long weekend. The incredible venue, with it’s panoramic views of London. The dark, misty atmosphere during arrival and the opening presentations. The venue being struck by lightening. People sitting under umbrellas as the rain poured through the open roof. Drinking Guiness with friends while watching hackers emerge from the West Hall into the foyer, dragging bean bags and laptops behind them. Lying on the floor watching Doctor Who with 300 hundred people applauding the Doctor’s blogging gag. The incredible, buzzing, crackling atmosphere of people coding through the night. John, Richard and Colm showing up at 10am on Sunday morning, and laughing “Have you two moved in the last 20 hours?” (we hadn’t). The crunch last few hours before presentations when we had to cut out half of what our hack did to get something to demo. Thirty minutes before Richard’s presentation when he turned to me and said, “It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work!”. And finally, winning the Most Useful Hack award.

Without getting too emotional about things, it was one hell of a weekend which will stay with me for ever.

It’s coming up to five O’Clock in the morning at Alexandra Palace. I’m still going stong to be honest, but I know I’m going to be frazzled in about 12 hours time.

There’s still a fair few fellow hackers up and working, but plenty of others scattered around the floor and the walls of the West Hall. Most trying to leverage two odd shaped bean-bags into various sleeping tools.

The atmosphere has been great all afternoon and evening. It was clear it was going to be a memorable day from the moment lightening struck the mast on top of the palace, accompanied by a huge explosion. The windows in the roof of the hall then proceeded to open and flood thousands of pounds of equipment with rain water. That was proceeded by a few hours of Wi-Fi free activities while BT fixed us up again.

Anyway, back to work for me. I’m building something. I’ve totally forgotten what it’s meant to do though. It’s got a database and a textfield I think. And some blue in it.

Update: It didn’t have any blue in it (that was a weird thing going on with Richard’s Mac Book screen), but it must have had something, as it was awarded the Yahoo! Most Useful Hack Award (or something like that). That was a bit of unexpected fun at the end of a very long and inspiring two days.

I’ll be up at Alexandra Palace tomorrow at the BBC/Yahoo! Hackday. I’m excited about it even thought I haven’t really got any plans or ideas for things to work on. The atmosphere at this amazing venue should be pretty special, and I can’t wait to see some of the cool stuff that is going to be created over the weekend.

Having said that, if anyone’s got a need for some web development skillz, or in-depth knowledge of mapping APIs, give me a shout. I’m probably going to have to get involved somewhere or they might just chuck me out.

See you there?