Hawksworx

Last night the newly assembled Osmosoft crew attended WikiWednesday - a regular meeting of technologists and business folk who share an interest in matters of all things wiki. These monthly sessions are an opportunity for people to discuss the use of wikis and any issues that surround them, from techie issues to business cases and adoption patterns.

We were lucky enough to be given the opening slot to demonstrate our latest toy - an implementation of TiddlyWiki which leveraged BT’s SDK to initiate phone calls. UnaMesa’s Martin Budden and our own Paul Downey demonstrated what we dubbed ‘Speed Geeking’, a little mashup which interpreted a set of contact details gathered from the WikiWednesday attendees as hCards and then randomly paired up the contacts so that a phone call could be created between each pair. It isn’t typical to hear a speaker at such an event remind the audience to “please keep your phones turned on!”, but that was how this session began. It ended with a room full of people coupled via phone calls, waving at each other across the room as they identified which stranger they had been connected to. Ring-tone chaos!

This little speed dating gizmo was put together in just one afternoon. TiddlyWiki is readily extensible and so it was a simple task to write some plugins for it to a) understand and represent hCard microformats, and b) make http requests to BT’s SDK in order to create phone calls on BT’s new $20 billion IP network dubbed 21CN. Anyone can sign up to the SDK for free and start using it to build their own cool applications to make calls, send and receive SMS messages and much more.

WikiWednesday was certainly a good chance to meet some like minded people, with enthusiasm for creating better tools and applications with wikis. There was a good deal of feedback about TiddlyWiki from people who were using it. Many people told me that they loved TiddlyWiki but almost all of those people also went on to say that they did not initially like using it, and that it took them a little while to reach the point where a lightbulb went on over their head, and they started to appreciate the benefits of using it for their particular task. This kind of feedback is just invaluable for us. Let’s hope that we can put it to good use and find ways to ease the required learning curve for people who are adopting TiddlyWiki.