Thinking about adding a Twitter stream to the Ubuntu install slideshow

[Dylan McCall]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 4:13 PM, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 01:37:20PM -0800, Dane Mutters wrote:
>> Colin Watson wrote:
>> > Given our scale, I'd say that the neighbourly thing to do is for Ubuntu
>> > installs to only touch Ubuntu network resources.  However, that isn't to
>> > say that an Ubuntu service couldn't deal with fetching a set of
>> > per-language feeds of interesting content from somewhere else, and then
>> > multiplex those out to clients installing Ubuntu (which would also allow
>> > filtering, swapping in some entirely different feed later, etc.).
>> > Perhaps talk with the Canonical sysadmins about the practicalities of
>>
>> What if we were to have this feed on Twitter, but instead of pulling
>> content directly from Twitter to the installer, copy it to an Ubuntu server
>> first, and pull it from the Ubuntu server to the installer?
>
> Yes, I think that's more or less what I meant. :-)  I would suggest not
> tying the implementation to a single social networking site; but having
> it on an Ubuntu server should make it easy to change later.

Thanks for all the positive feedback and the suggestions! They're all
awesome and I'm fighting the urge to worry about all of them at once.

For the no network access question, I was thinking of using the area
typically reserved for a picture, on the right side of last slide.
With no network connection the Twitter feed would be replaced by a
screenshot of whatever the slide is about (support, at the moment), or
maybe just a nice picture like it has in the first slide. (See
http://people.ubuntu.com/~dylanmccall/ubiquity-slideshow-ubuntu/preview/).
Now you mention it, it might work better to use a dedicated slide. My
only mockup so far consists of a terrible drawing made with a pen that
I think has hallucinogenic properties, because everything looks better
to me while I'm using it. This'll be my weekend project, unless
someone with good taste beats me to it :)

Great point about it being easy to change if there's a proxy service
we own. I do suspect it's a long shot that this could work for 5 years
straight (given that Twitter was only launched in 2006), so that makes
a lot of sense indeed.

I posted a little question at https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/5148
about the bandwidth problem.
I'd like to get _something_ in for alpha 2, so that'll likely be
pulling straight from Twitter via some simple means. Should be helpful
for testing!
Then, I'd like to build something that mimics the search widget using
a (simple) custom feed, grabbed from a web service that periodically
runs (and caches) searches, which shouldn't be too hard to build (at
least in the sense that it'll do what is asked of it). As well as
being neighbourly, all the hacky bits could live there, saving a lot
of worry and a bit of space.

The tricky bit for me will be getting somewhere to put that fancy web
service. I guess I can make a prototype on my own end, but it would
not do to point the real thing at my personal web space. (For both
monetary and ethical reasons. Especially ethical ones. Honest!). That
can be fixed somehow, I'm sure :)

Dylan

PS: I seem to have gathered a laundry list of things that I need to
wander over to Canonical IS and get their help with. Who should I talk
to about that, anyway? :)