Eureka! Thanks to Yee, who pointed out to me that Slide could accept an input RSS feed. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. What I want is to produce a slideshow based on the Twitter public timeline. I previously piped the Twitter feed through Yahoo Pipes‘ content analysis module. Basically, this module extracts some meaning from each tweet (Twitter item). What Yahoo Pipes does when this pipe is run is produce a page full of images. So each image supposedly represents each tweet.
But I wanted for people to be able to include the result on their web page, if they’d like to. The Yahoo result takes up too much space. I wanted to produce an HTML badge or a slideshow or some compact way to present the images. I tried Teqlo, but while it’s a great tool, it’s not that kind of mashup tool. Next I tried SplashCast, which you can see I’ve gone nuts with the past few days. While I love SplashCast, it can only take Flickr or YouTube RSS feeds. Then Yee tipped me off to Slide, which takes any RSS feed that includes images and produces a slideshow.
You can view the show on Slide’s site, which also shows thumbnails of all the images in the slideshow, or you can embed their player HTML badge code into your site, like I’ve done above. And voila! The “Every Twitter Tells A Story” web 2.0 monster mashup is finally complete: from Twitter through Yahoo Pipes transformed by Flickr and displayed in Slide. (By the way, you can also turn your slideshow into a screen saver.)
While it’d be nice to have manual control over the slideshow, Slide’s display is still tons of fun. Now, the only variation I’d still like to try is to find an application that will not only display each Flickr image and it’s text, but also the original tweet text for each image. My thought is that SplashCast is the most ideal vehicle fo this, but the functionality is not currently there. Still, I don’t doubt they or someone will come up with the right app. Isn’t the plug-n-play web amazing?
P.S. One other thing that Slide has is called SkinFlix. Silly name but you can wrap a skin around a YouTube video. Here’s the TV skin wrapped around a blooper video from the Supernatural TV show.
Originally posted on April 5, 2007 @ 2:30 pm