What about an API for SCN?

I have to say, I’m starting to like the new SCN. I still feel like the new guy in a large office building (or more geeky: playing ZORK for the first time 😉 ). The thing I like most is that it seems to engage me a lot more than the ‘old’ SDN, which was more focussed on performing specific tasks:browsing new articles in the forum, reading blogs – there wasn’t really a lot that would send me to unchartered areas of SCN.

Now that we have the Activity view (even though I still need my places landing page in order to quickly find my main areas of interest) my personal SCN horizon has extended to that of my contacts:

I have seen people compare that to Facebook, which uses similar discovery mechanisms. This may get a lot more dilluted if the number of spaces and friends increase, which is why I think we may need filtered views sooner or later.

But the main thing I was trying to get to is that we need a signaling mechanism for activity towards yourself. I know that Jive has a REST API, so I wonder if that is active…? It would be neat to have a competition for the next TechEd to see what kind of integration / tools developers would come up with.

My personal favorite would be a Twitter integration – send me a tweet/DM if there is activity directed towards me (direct message, comment on blog or discussion), and if I tweet something with hashtag #scn update my SCN status.

Now wouldn’t that be neat…? 😉