Yellow is the New Blog

A brand new addition to the BleedYellow portfolio is a "labs" version of a microblogging application for Domino called "Squawk". Although it has several integration points with Lotus Connections (for example, you do not need to register separately for this application - you can use your existing BleedYellow credentials - and your profile picture in Squawk is whatever picture, if any, you've uploaded to your BleedYellow profile), the application itself runs entirely on Domino.

Originally envisioned purely as a proof of concept demonstrating that Domino applications can scale massively if architected well, we've decided to host it on an ongoing basis as a BleedYellow service. And, when the time comes, if you'd like to purchase a copy to run in your own intra/extranet (with or without Connections integration)... I suspect we can arrange that.

Squawk is still in the alpha stages, but we wanted to share it with you in its infancy to make you a part of its development. Here's a brief summary of what currently works and what will at a later date:

• Post a Squawk: like most micro-blogging applications, each post is limited to 140 characters.
  
• Community Squawks: this is a global transcript of the last 20 Squawks from anyone in the BleedYellow community.
• My Flock: search for people in the community; each search result will include the individual's name and profile picture (the Connections default image if they haven't uploaded one yet), and a subscribe/unsubscribe link based on whether or not they're already in your Flock. An icon for each member of your Flock will appear in a block on the right; hover over their icon to see their name, click their icon to view their latest Squawks.
• Various links (Profile, Settings, Home, etc.) are either just placeholders or, for the time being, unnecessary: for example, the Home link is a bit superfluous, because at the moment, Squawk is a single-page Ajax application.
  
• My Replies: we haven't wired these in yet, but at the moment our thinking is that @shortname will denote a Squawk as a reply to the individual with the matching shortname. We'll also be adding a reply icon that will automatically insert the shortname for you. But we're also going to be adding nicknames, so if you want to type @trip, for example, to reply to me, you can tell Squawk to treat that as a nickname for me. If you've defined a nickname for a member of your Flock, clicking the reply icon will insert the nickname you use for them instead of the default.
  
• In a related feature, at some point we'll also be allowing you to create groups from your Flock and direct a Squawk just to a specific group or individual: for example, "hello world #test !dxl" would tag the Squawk as "test" and it would only display to members of my "dxl" group. We're also going to allow you to load a default set of groups based on which BleedYellow communities you're a member of and who else is a member of each.
• Speaking of tagging, tags aren't clickable yet but of course will be later... in the meantime (and going forward), if you tag a Squawk with #bug or #feature, we'll use that feedback to improve this application.

So head on over to squawk.bleedyellow.com and check it out.

P.S. Interesting bit of trivia: Squawk instantiates a single view handle when the Community Squawks transcript is requested; searching for people to add to your Flock naturally performs a full-text search... every other function in Squawk ignores indexes entirely.