Roomatic Rewind
Just a quick update... The second Roomatic version I whipped up a couple weeks ago using Disqus as the back-end was a fantastic failure. It was interesting to try, but generally useless to me and everyone else, so I reverted back to the old version which polled Twitter Search for keywords and displayed them as a chat room.
Within a few hours I was immediately rewarded with the following email:
I use the instant twitter chat all the time, it's great. Can you embed this on a site?
Thx Cindy
Sent from Cindy's iPhone : )
That's very encouraging to get such immediate feedback, as all I did was tweet the rollback last night and I don't actually know Cindy. Also, I only made a minimal effort to make Roomatic iPhone friendly, so it's cool she sent it from her mobile. Creating a widget is a good idea, though embedding Roomatic is insanely simple, actually, just using an iframe like I did at the top of this post:
<iframe src ="http://roomatic.com/%23dnc08" width="500px" height="520px" style="border:none"></iframe>
The source URL just can end with any "room" (i.e. keyword, including hash tags) and it'll display within that iframe. I added a style to get rid of the 3D frame, and it looks good on Firefox right now, but if you don't see it correctly, leave a comment with your OS/Browser of choice.
I think I need to do some more work making Roomatic more useful as a live keyword tracker, as that's mostly what I use it for. I personally never log in and use it as a chatroom as I had originally intended, but for keeping track of stuff like the Olympics or Stevenotes, I think it actually works quite well. I'll have to mull over some enhancements to that core functionality and add them in.
-Russ