Microblogging seems to be the rage these days, so I was looking at Indian alternatives to Twitter, and I found Webaroo Gupshup (later I realized that I had already received an invite but hadn’t paid attention to it).

Gupshup seems to hit the sweet spot in the Indian context because its all about sms and mobile phones and combines it with the web. For example, you can start your own group and update your microblog via sms, and it’ll be automatically forwarded (as sms) to all those who subscribe to your channel. The posts are also available on a webpage. The added viral/social features are the ability to conduct your own polls or quizzes and even ratings.

I signed up for Gupshup and created my own microblog located at http://sms.webaroo.com/channels/Swaroop.

This got me thinking how people actually promote their microblog, and it turns out that one of the important things is a widget on their blog that points to the microblog, especially the Twitter badge.

So, I was looking for a widget for Gupshup as well but couldn’t find one. Why not write one myself?

It seemed pretty easy to create it using Flex because Gupshup now has RSS feeds. And just a hour and half of tinkering got me to create this:

I’ve put up the source MXML file for those interested. The tough work is handled by the <mx:HTTPService> tag which fetches the feed and outputs an XML which is easy to handle thanks to E4X. The rest is just housekeeping code.

Note that you’ll need your own proxy php script because of the security restrictions of the Flash player.

Somewhat relatedly, I got an invite to Popfly, thanks to Sriram, which helps anybody to create exactly these kind of widgets.

It turned out to be even easier to achieve it using Popfly:

1. Create a mashup
2. Click RSS block to add it to the main area
3. Edit to add the address of the RSS feed of your choice
4. Click News Reader block to add it to the main area
5. Connect the RSS block to the News Reader block
6. Click Save

You’re done. Here’s what you get:

Note that you might need Microsoft Silverlight installed to view this.

The upside is that it is ridiculously easy to create your own such mashups/widgets. The downside is that it is not easy to achieve the look and feel that you specifically want, it tends to all look the same (like the omnipresent Kubrick theme for Wordpress). For example, on my computer, the Popfly widget appears with scrollbars, and I can’t figure out how to get rid of the scrollbars.

About microblogging itself, I am not sure how long I’ll be into it, I’m just trying it out to see what’s all the fuss about.

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Posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 6:50 am.
Filed under categories: Adobe, Flex, Microsoft, Tech, Web.