Like many early IM users, I was a heavy user of AIM for a very long time. (I also had a 6 digit ICQ number, but the lack of friends on the network led to me abandoning it). The first IM platform I implemented on what eventually became the IM support in Tropo was AIM. AIM holds a special place in my heart.
Today’s Chart of the Day from Silicon Alley Insider (SAI) is Comscore’s metrics on the use of various IM networks. For the venerable AIM, it isn’t pretty. After years in the #1 spot, a sharp decline starting at the end of 2008 led SAI to title their graphic “The Death Of AOL Instant Messenger.”
Yahoo had a huge spike around the same time, but within 6 months declined back to around where they started. I’m not sure what caused the Yahoo spike, but a few things may have contributed. Yahoo 9.0 was released around that time, as was the Yahoo iPhone IM client.
Facebook and Google Talk aren’t represented on the chart. Comscore is unable to break the IM traffic out from Gmail and regular Facebook usage.
With the availability of the Tropo Web API, it’s been great to see the development of Tropo libraries for various programming languages, which let developers easily and quickly build Tropo apps for voice and SMS. We now have Tropo Web API libraries available for Ruby, PHP, Python and C#:
However, as those libraries have evolved, we’ve found that they’ve developed in slightly different directions with regard to the naming of the repository on Github and to the module names, etc. We gave some thought to the best way to provide guidance to make it easier on developers, and came up with these goals:
Provide a consistent repo name so developers using multiple languages can easily locate their downloaded/cloned directories on their local systems.
Provide consistent naming of module/library names and function/class names so developers can move with ease from one language to another. (Use case: a developer builds a Ruby app for one client for Tropo. Developer then needs to build a PHP app for another client. Developer should be able to move from one Tropo library to another without having to relearn or guess what the names are.)
Allow for the future creation of additional Tropo-related modules/libraries
To get there, the existing repositories are going to migrate to these new names:
http://github.com/tropo/tropo-webapi-ruby
http://github.com/tropo/tropo-webapi-php
http://github.com/tropo/tropo-webapi-python
http://github.com/tropo/tropo-webapi-ruby
Going forward, we’ll ask that anyone creating a new Tropo Web API module please follow this same naming convention.
We’re also going to move the names of the actual modules to be more consistent. The result will be something like:
Ruby
require ‘tropo-webapi-ruby’
PHP
require ‘tropo-webapi.class.php’;
python
from tropo_webapi import *
C#
using TropoCSharp.TropoWebAPI;
You’ll note that we’re treating “webapi” as one word in the names.
We’re in the process of working with the library authors to make these changes now. The migration is a pain, quite honestly, because it’s going to break existing applications, samples, tests, etc., but we want to do this once so as these modules start to get more widely used, there is a good degree of consistency between them.
We’ll let you know as the libraries are moved over to the new convention – and please let us know now if you have any feedback on this issue.
Thanks – and we’re definitely looking forward to continuing to see the awesome apps you all are building with Tropo!
As promised, the Scripting Guide now includes PHP examples! These go along with the original JavaScript examples and the recently added Ruby examples. Now when you go take a look at each chapter, you’ll see:
Many of the examples in the guide have also been fleshed out, so they can be directly copied into a hosted file and actually work (though they’re usually still pretty simple). If your flavor of choice is Python or Groovy, have faith – they’re incoming, as is a new and heavily improved WebAPI Guide.
Questions, comments, praise? Send us an e-mail to support@tropo.com. Interested in more complex examples? Check out our Tutorials and Samples.
Amber and Aaron are on the bottom left of this photo.
There is no doubt that this weekend’s 24-hour Open Government Tinkerstorm was a huge success! A conference room full of passionate open government developers came together along with city leaders like Bill Schrier, Seattle’s CTO, and Robin Friedman, former Seattle Emergency and Disaster Management Director. Tropo, Socrata, and Amazon AWS sponsored the event and remained on hand to help and guide the event participants to success. In the end, all of the entries developed and deployed are available as open source and were produced for the benefit of the citizens of Seattle.
Reflecting on the event, I wanted to share an interesting observation that I had during the course of the contest. The winners of the iPad, Amber Case and Aaron Parecki, were not originally in the contest. They were hanging out with us at the event working on their totally awesome side project called GeoLoqi. Halfway through the event, Aaron looks in my direction and says that he is interested in integrating Tropo SMS with GeoLoqi. Several minutes later his iPhone buzzes with an SMS and he looks at me and Amber and says, “It worked! GeoLoqi just me an SMS notification triggered by my location!” This was certainly very exciting for all of us but it the event gets more interesting…
Amber and Aaron left to get some sleep and came back in the morning for breakfast with an idea to enter the contest. Their idea was ChatterCast, a mashup of Tropo, Socrata’s data.seattle.gov, Instamapper, and GeoLoqi services. Basically ChatterCast subscribes your phone to real-time 911 call data provided by http://data.seattle.gov. ChatterCast alerts you based on your location of 911 events happening around you.
This is a great example of how someone with an idea can not only win a contest only after getting started in the final hours but how anyone with an idea can change the world. Tropo’s ease of use makes it super easy to communicate with telephones via voice and SMS or even IM and Twitter with a couple of lines a code. There’s no reason not to add telephone support to your existing web applications to make them even more powerful in this mobile and social age we live in today. So what are you waiting on? Sign-up for Tropo today and change the world!
Saturday and Sunday, a bunch of developers wrapped up Seattle Geek Week by participating in an hackathon to build apps with government APIs and data. Here’s what you missed…
Tropo fueled the hacking by providing plenty of food and drink. We had several developers around to help people with their projects, as did Socrata. Amazon stopped by for a bit, and Bill Schrier (Seattle’s CTO) and Sarah Schacht (Executive Director of Knowledge is Power) came by to offer ideas and see what people were working on.
At 4:30pm on Sunday all the teams came up to demo their apps. Troy Davis’s entry SirenSpotter shows you what police and fire activity is happening near you right now. Russell Branca created an app that shows city-owned landmarks on a map and pulls in nearby photos for each landmark. A team led by Socrata’s Chris Metcalf built Notifyre, a tool that will call you if the fire department responds to a 911 call at your house.
The two apps that won the hackathon were ChatterCast, an entry from Amber Case and Aaron Parecki, and GeoNotify from Max Ogden, Reid Beels, and Russell Branca.
ChatterCast, which won the Socrata prize of an iPad, uses Instamapper to track your phone and compares your location to 911 and other data provided by the City of Seattle using Socrata’s platform. When you enter an area that has something going on, ChatterCast uses Tropo to sends a text message to your phone, alerting you to the activity.
GeoNotify won the Tropo prize, including a Flip Mino HD and a year’s membership to Animoto Pro. Their app allows you to draw a shape on a map and subscribe to SMS alerts for things that happen inside that shape. Get road closure and traffic alerts for things that happen along your commute. Find out when public activities take place at a nearby park. The app uses data from the city of Portland and sends SMS alerts through Tropo.
Congratulations to our winners, and thanks so much for everyone that participated in the Hackathon and helped out with making it a success.
Want to create your own voice and SMS apps? Tropo is simple, powerful and completely free for developer usage. Sign up now.
For the Gnomedex hackathon we sponsored this weekend, I spent most of my time helping out teams who were building things using Tropo. But mid-morning today, inspiration struck for my own project. It’s not huge, so I was able to hack it together quickly and it’s a great sample app.
Remember police scanners? You can listen to live radio traffic between police cars. Some people do it for profit, like news reporters or ambulance chasers. Others do it for fun, just to hear what’s going on. The City of Seattle, one of our sponsors publishes their fire department 911 calls in near-real time using services from Socrata, another hackathon sponsor. So I wrote up an app that emulates a police scanner, using 911 dispatches as a data source.
Call a phone number, and Tropo will fetch the current list of 911 data from Socrata and play the incidents over the phone. For demo purposes, we’re only fetching data every 15 minutes and we’re getting any calls from the last 10 hours.
Approximately 20 passionate programmers participated in Tropo and Socrata’s open government 24-hour Tinkerstorm (or Hack-a-thon) in conjunction with Chris Pirillo’s GnomeDex 2010. We are currently at the half-way point of the competition. Bill Schrier (Seattle’s CTO) stopped by to check on the status of the projects and provide additional inspiration. Max Ogden and Reid Beels flew in from Portland, Oregon and Mark Silverberg flew in from Washington, DC just to participate in our Tinkerstorm!
One theme that I picked up on quickly from the Tinkerstorm was the love of Socrata’s data API. Most of Seattle’s available data can be access through their site at http://data.seattle.gov. The organizers were able to keep the coffee fresh and provide an awesome dinner and breakfast buffets, and plenty of idea people offering suggestions and feedback throughout the night!
Tim from Amazon Web Services stopped by to provide AWS discount codes to assistance with the deployment. Even the SmartCups from GnomeDex came handy. Everyone knows how much programmers love and need caffeine in events like this one!
Aaron and Amber also stopped by from GeoLoqi. Geoloqi is a private, real-time mobile and web platform for securely sharing location data, with features such as Geonotes, proximal notification, and sharing real-time GPS maps with friends.
Sunday morning has rolled around and the looming 5PM event deadline is approaching too much quickly. Willow Bl00 was now joined us to hack on her own project.
Here are a few fun pictures from last night’s event:
@Chewbanca showing off his Google Maps, Flickr, and Socrata mashup!
A group of developers will descend upon the Edgewater Hotel right next to the Gnomedex venue and build apps to help our fellow citizens. Socrata will be there with a bunch of government APIs and data sets for you to work with and Seattle’s CTO Bill Schrier will be stopping by to talk about open government from the perspective of the government. Amazon’s bringing a stack of AWS credit to help you with a place to host your apps. We’ve got a few people on hand to help you understand Tropo and create some great apps with these platforms.
We’re kicking off at 5pm on Saturday and running 24 hours straight. Dinner on Saturday, and breakfast and lunch on Sunday are being provided, as is plenty of coffee all night long. We’ve even got a cash bar running for a bit each evening. And we’ve got some great wifi provided by Meraki.
Why should you do this? Beyond the challenge of building apps that will improve the lives of all around you, we’re also handing out prizes. Want an iPad, a Flip HD, or a year of Animoto Pro? Sunday afternoon, everyone will present their apps and at 5pm on Sunday, the top apps will get some prizes.
Tropo has a number of customers who are building apps for government applications, so we’re excited to be able to be part of this. Heck, even some of our sample apps are themed around opengov or use government data, like our BART eta checker, weather forecasts, or our traffic alerts.
You don’t have to be attending Gnomedex to come to the hackathon. Go sign up (it’s free) and come by and help out. Not in Seattle but still want to participate? We’ve got an IRC channel (#tinkerstorm on Freenode) and a Google Group.
In a blatant show of favoritism (stemming from our VP of Innovation Jason Goecke, a true Rubyist if there ever was one), we have now included Ruby code examples in the Tropo Scripting Guide.
These are paired with the existing JavaScript examples that were already there, so now when you read through the guide, instead of just seeing:
You’ll see:
This effectively doubles the Guide’s comprehensiveness as well as its overall usefulness, and is just one step in our ongoing documentation enhancements. For example, the Guide has also been revamped to include more detailed information about previously under-documented topics, such as the currentCall Global Variable.
Next on the docket? In another blatant show of favoritism (originating from our infamous Developer Evangelist Adam Kalsey), we will be including a set of PHP examples to slide right along with JavaScript and Ruby. Stay tuned!
Decisions for Heroes provides a web-based application that helps organize and analyze rescue operations and training exercises. From team and individual status reports, training updates, and communication to rescuers, Decisions for Heroes (D4H) helps save lives by improving the response time and response quality of rescue organizations.
While volunteering as a rescue climber for the Irish Coast Guard, Robin Blandford noticed that first responder teams all faced three common challenges. “They have a lot of equipment to train in, massive communication logistics, and large amounts of paperwork to back it up.” Robin set out to ease these issues, allowing emergency responder groups to make better, faster decisions.
Blandford’s creation allows teams to monitor response readiness, team availability, valid qualifications, and rescuer experience. All a team member needs is a browser and an internet connection and they can record details from their rescue operations or training exercises. Decisions for Heroes analyzes this raw data to create charts, heatmaps and benchmarks that teams can use to find areas or strength and weakness. By studying the patterns that emerge, teams can even embark on education campaigns to reduce accidents before they happen.
Decisions for Heroes just added SMS for US and Canadian teams using Tropo. Using either a web-based interface or a mobile phone, teams can blast messages out to a specific user or an entire group. The system allows messages to be targeted to everyone or just those that are on call at that moment. Teams can use this to quickly organize a rescue effort without having to contact each member individually.
Responders can interact with D4H with SMS as well. A rescuer that’s taking a break can send a text message to Decisions for Heroes and be taken off the on-call list and can check back in via SMS when they return.
Decisions for Heroes chose Tropo to provide their SMS services. Our interconnection with large numbers of global SMS networks allows them to expand the service without worrying that their SMS provider can’t keep up. Our built-in support for PHP means their development team didn’t have to learn a new platform. Our customer obsession teams have allowed them to iterate rapidly, knowing that support is always around if questions arise.
Robin says they’re planning on adding voice services using Tropo, allowing updates and notifications anywhere you have a phone line. A prototype has been built, and plans for further development and rollout are in the works.
Today’s Chart of the Day from Silicon Alley Insider (SAI) is Comscore’s metrics on the use of various IM networks. For the venerable AIM, it isn’t pretty. After years in the #1 spot, a sharp decline starting at the end of 2008 led SAI to title their graphic “The Death Of AOL Instant Messenger.”
A group of developers will descend upon the 
