Mini-review: Qik for Android

I downloaded and installed Qik (qik.com) on Android yesterday to check it out. Qik is an app/service that allows you to broadcast video "live" from your Android phone (G1 in my case). The first thing I did, of course, was broadcast a quick video. The video quality was about as expected, a little grainy and a little too dark. These are all complaints about the G1's camera though, and not the app. The app itself performs quite well with what it has to work with. It hasn't had any noticeable hiccups or lagging when streaming live, and I think that's arguably the most important part. The audio quality is good, but not incredible, but again this is due to hardware limitations. Again, it makes the best of what is has, so that's good.

The app itself has a minimalist interface (function above form), though the look is still very sleek and not cluttered, a welcome respite from a good section of Android apps. Qik is also very simple to use: start the app and hit your shutter button or the touchscreen equivalent to begin broadcasting, the rest is automatic. Another great thing is the ability to customize a slide-up "share this" quick list. Add any contact from your phone to share by (your choice of) SMS or e-mail. There are also integration features for sharing your live broadcast on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others which will appear in the quick share list also.

The bottom line is that the app is excellent. It makes great use of what my G1's hardware is capable of without sacrificing quality elsewhere. It's easy to use and has a sleek minimalist interface and easily integrates with your favorite services. Highly recommended for any Android user.

Bringing AI to Twitter

So lately I have been thinking a bit about egg-fu; what direction I should go in or if I should even update the source at all. I had been thinking of different ways to implement egg-fu in today's cyberspace. The internet has changed, obviously, in a lot of ways since 8 years ago when the project first began, so I was pondering on ways to bring egg-fu back into the mainstream a bit. One possibility I thought of was porting egg-fu to Twitter. I figured (at least for the development instance of egg-fu) if I direct him to follow the right people he could emulate a certain amount of intelligence quite easily. Of course, I could have him learn from dumb people as well, if I wanted him to. It would not be hard at all to have egg-fu follow certain trending topics and give his unique input in the form of replies and quite possibly formulate his own original tweets based on the things he picks up from other twitterers. The difficult part though, which I was having trouble convincing myself wouldn't be too much work to make the whole thing worthwhile is the fact that I would have to deal with the Twitter API. I wasn't entirely convinced this was the best way to code a simulated-AI bot. I just had my doubts and this feeling that there had to be a better way to accomplish this. So I let the idea receed to the back of my thoughts for a while, to stew.

Then just the other day I was browsing through hundreds of apps in the Android Market, ever curious about what is out there, and I came across something that piqued my interest. I discovered the app LinkDroid, which uses webhooks to manage data. Here is a quote from the app's description:

"Webhooks (webhooks.org) are user defined callback URIs that receive HTTP Posts in response to user actions or system events. For example, LinkDroid (linkdroid.org) can post media, such as images, to defined Webhooks when users selects the Share With option. LinkDroid can also post broadcasted events (by Android, or other programs) to target Webhook (via a background service) as specified by registered IntentFilters."

What intrigued me was the touted ability to define these webhooks in this way, but I was ignorant of what webhooks were or what they really do. So I did the research and found out what I needed to know, but even more importantly I realized this was probably exactly what I was looking for to port egg-fu as a Twitter-enabled bot.

So what I'd do next would obviously be to start outlining and brainstorming on this idea. More to come.