So I start writing iZendo from scratch and make quite good progress in simplifying it down. Just four pages and some AJAX to update the lists. All looks good till my crisis of faith! Could I do this with twitter? Could I ‘just’ have a Twitter feed that is the virtual zendo? It would certainly save a lot of effort and would integrate with all the IM and phone systems etc.
The trouble is I can’t see how we get a public page that updates in near real time to show messages from multiple people. The zendo would have to follow people and look for messages that said they were meditating or it would have to wait for direct messages and post them back as messages on its own page so others could see them. None of these things work. Even if I used the API the app would need to poll the server all the time and there can be quite long delays on this. We are limited to once a minute for starters. This would need to run on a ‘real’ server not a hosted space.
Looks like it isn’t feasible but maybe I should sleep on it.
Thanks for listening,