Twitter has been all the rage amongst web geeks for a few months now. But as the service starts to catch on with the general public, keeping up on all the Tweet messages can get a little crazy. It only gets crazier as you start following tweets from your coworkers, ColdFusion gurus, the Mac community, and, oh yeah, Jack Bauer. With a little help from Yahoo Pipes, you can organize and separate tweets into different RSS feeds.

Twitter exposes most of its service functionality through an extensive API system. The API is powerful and insanely simple. On top of that, most of the tweet lists are available in both RSS and JSON form. Using just a few lines of scripting code, you can bring all the elements of Twitter to your own web site or desktop gadget/widget.

Take this a step farther, and you can pull the RSS feeds for individual tweet streams into a single Yahoo Pipe. Pull the pipe through a sort operator on the publication date and the various Twitter streams intermingle into one timeline. The pipe has its own RSS feed that you can follow in your feed reader of choice or pull into your own applications.

I just threw together two quick examples, a ColdFusion Tweet pipe and a Flex Tweet pipe. Neither is exhaustive but there’s enough there to get the basic idea.

This is some very cool stuff, a perfect example of opening up your applications so your users can decide how to consume them.

If ever you find me suffering from delirium, a sense of suffocation, and eventual collapse… please pry the chicken nuggets away from me.

This morning mealtime moment has been brought to you by the Blankbaby Media Empire.

A coworker of mine has been researching secure Flex 2 remote object calls to ColdFusion cfc’s over HTTPS. Seems simple enough, but anytime sensitive information is passed over the Internets I’d really like it to be bulletproof. Sure, I’m comfortable with HTTPS, but opening a flash swf over HTTP and trusting that it’s using HTTPS behind the scenes makes me a queasy system admin.

By default, a Flash movie can only access data through the exact domain where it was itself accessed. So, when you open a Flash swf over HTTP it can’t open a remote object over HTTPS to the same domain. The data host server can be tweaked to allow HTTP to HTTPS communication. But do I really want to make this tweak?

Adobe has this to say about it in a Flash tech note:

A secure server that allows access to movies hosted via a non-secure protocol
It is not advisable to permit HTTP content to access HTTPS content. This practice can compromise the security offered by HTTPS.

Most of the developers using our CF servers for Flex purposes are only using HTTPS for authentication. The rest of their app data is generally non-sensitive and doesn’t require encryption.

Is there really a security risk in opening a swf over HTTP and then making HTTPS remote object calls? If the endpoint is set in the Flex 2 app to an https address, all signs indicate that communication from the swf is going over HTTPS.

Fourth of July in Philly is going to be hot.

Hot pink.

DDJ.com has posted an audio interview with David Streams, Group Program Manager for the Windows Live Team at Microsoft, discussing the current field of gadgets.

Streams touches on a couple interesting topics: plans (or lack thereof) for integration with other gadget platforms, protecting intellectual property, and monetizing gadgets.

The basic gist is that monetizing gadgets at this point would be difficult. Primarily because gadget source is difficult to obscure and even more difficult to wrap within a licensing model. They are much better suited in the commercial world as complementary add-on’s to full-scale applications.

We Feel Fine is an interesting web app tracking what bloggers are saying about how they feel over time.

According to the site’s methodology section, it has been scanning blogs for phrases like “I feel” and “I am feeling” and grabbing the full sentence when it gets a hit, along with whatever author data can be scraped from the site. The results are organized and presented in six completely different, filterable interfaces.

The different results interfaces are impressive for an applet. The Madness view is a cloud of dots on speed. The Murmur view is reminiscent of the PostSecret project. If nothing else, the site is a cool proof-of-concept on organizing large amounts of statistical data harvested from web content.

Back in December I declared the Pub on Passyunk East (POPE) to be poop. I’ve been back there a few times since December, and I feel like it’s time to clear up my beef with the POPE.

POPE, I’m sorry. Can we be friends again?

One my biggest complaints with the place was a total lack of people accentuated by the massive interior of the bar. This place is huge inside, especially compared to other neighborhood bars down here. But it’s not empty anymore. The people are coming in droves and they are bringing their motor scooters. The extra space does keep things from feeling too crowded though and there’s always an open table if you’re bringing a group.

The jukebox is packed with indie albums and some throw-back discs — definitely one of the best available in the S-Illy if you’re into music.

The food situation is still appetizer heavy, so don’t go for dinner. But there’s plenty of grease to choose from after an all-afternoon/early-evening Yard’s bender. And that’s what counts… I think.

So, POPE, here’s my olive branch. I hope you accept my apology. It’s getting really awkward avoiding you around the Passyunk coffee houses.

I’m more than a bit disappointed by the InsideMicrosoft blog’s latest round-up of “good” gadgets: Some Good Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets, Issue 3.

Insanely long title aside, are any of these gadgets really impressive? I need more than simple search to get excited about using desktop gadgets. The latest versions of Firefox and IE both make this type of gadget obsolete with their customizable search bars. Who wants to keep a box open and running constantly on the desktop just to search Amazon?

Gadgets take up valuable pieces of screen real estate. They need to have a seriously compelling interface or piece of functionality to justify keeping one of these things open. And once a gadget is closed it may as well be uninstalled since it becomes easier to open an application than restore the gadget.

Twadget (pictured but not mentioned) is the most compelling gadget in this crop. The gadget itself isn’t doing anything amazing. It just helps people interact more efficiently with the Twitter social messaging service. It takes something that people are already using and makes it easier to access. The real power of desktop gadgets lies in opening new points of entry for larger applications, whether the apps are web-based or installed on the computer.

As long as the never-changing Homeland Security Terror Alert Level is considered a “good” gadget, there’s plenty of room for improvement.

What’s your idea of a “good” gadget?

Microsoft offers up its view on what makes for a good gadget in a document buried under their Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines: Windows Sidebar Gadgets.

Despite being hidden away on the MSDN site, this is actually a really focused, useful set of guidelines for anyone thinking about creating desktop gadgets.

After some basic info on what a gadget is, the document explores what type of functionality belongs in a desktop gadget. There are visuals comparing examples of good and bad gadget layouts. There’s also guidelines for making the most of the Sidebar gadget framework, advice on handling different states of interaction visually, and recommended sizing standards.

I only have two molars left in my mouth that do not have some sort of filling. I’ve always been prone to cavities. Which makes me wonder why I stopped going to dentist after college.

I could blame poor dental insurance coverage, but really I have an irrational fear of dentists. It dates back to my childhood when I used to visit a fantastical dental wonderland of fun for children in Northeast Philly. That dentist has long since retired to Arizona last I heard from a grade-school classmate who started working for him after high school.

But I vividly remember this dentist telling a hygenist that his vacation condo had been destroyed by a hurricane and all of his property washed away. All the while he counted off multiple divets in my teeth for fillings with dollars signs flashing in his eyes. Thinking back on it now, I probably completely made this up in grade school as a bullshit story to tell other kids why I had so many cavities.

Anyway, I’m reaping the rewards of my paranoia now. My prize for returning to a proper regiment of oral hygeine: five cavities and one root canal. Two of the cavities will most likely require root canal at some point in the future. The root canal was actually the least painful procedure. It’s never good when drilling goes so deep the bit gets lodged in a tooth. Ouch.