modest mash-up effort using two great applications

I recall reading Russell Baker's The Good Times, in which he asserted that he got the big job (being the top national political reporter for the Times) at just the moment when it stopped being a big job. (There's a whole backstory here involving Bill Lawrence, his close relationship with JFK, and Lawrence's downfall at the New York Times.) I thought of that story this weekend after finishing an application that uses the Twitter API and social networking features of the WorldCat.org platform: I finished my customized Twitter app just when people began getting sick of Twitter (example).

I wrote about this a month earlier, but in summary: I'm using the Twitter API and cURL to authenticate and build the list of status updates for the folks I'm following. Using the Twitter API, I have control over the presentation look/feel and the number of returned results. I've coded the application to handle links with the exception of hash tags (in updates). For WorldCat.org, I'm processing XML from a public list that I've created in the .org platform.

Twitter...it's so January.