I've been exploring Node.js recently (long story, which will see a book come out of it reasonably soon) and one site I've come across is Storify. It first caught my eye because it's supposedly implemented using Node.js, but once I got there some of the functionality really caught my eye. The site appears to still be in a private "beta" but they have some examples published that shows fantastic integration with social networking sites.
For example.. if you want to refer to a specific in your article, the simple ways are
- to paste in the URL making your visitor go to
twitter.com to read the tweet,
- copy/paste the text of the tweet, attaching the URL,
- taking a screen shot and embedding the image.
But, on the Storify site an embedded tweet is a useful widget that supports directly retweeting or sending @ replies to the author of the embedded tweet. It's not just tweets, the examples I see on the site are Twitpic images, and YouTube videos.
After a couple days of this rumbling in my head I was struck that it's feasible to implement this in Drupal, and further there is an existing module which could be a useful starting point:
http://drupal.org/project/googtube
The question is.. why was that link presented by Drupal as a bare link? What if the link filter were to recognize it as a link to a Drupal project and render a useful widget about the Drupal project in question? What about a link to, say,
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCivilWars ... a youtube channel page, why can't that be a little video player showing videos from that channel. Or a link to a youtube video, why not render it as a youtube video player? Or a link to a flikr or other photosharing site, why not render a thumbnail of the image?
Go to this page ...
http://storify.com/ajestream/miyagi ... play with some of the objects.
Now.. look at the googtube module source:
http://drupalcode.org/project/googtube.git/blob/HEAD:/googtube.module
Don't you see that the googtube_youtube and googtube_google functions serve as a pattern, and that a googtube_twitter function could take twitter links and render them with some javascript code which implements a widget like the one on the
storify.com page referenced above? And that to support fancy widgets for links to various services is "just" a matter of adding a preg_replace_callback matching the link pattern for each service, and a googtube_xyzzy function to match?
This is quite possible.
http://drupal.org/node/1108528 is the place to add some opinions.
UPDATE: Some comments were made when this post lived on
davidherron.com. Those comments are important enough to replicate here ...
http://www.oembed.com/ - https://github.com/embedly -
http://drupal.org/project/oembed
https://github.com/embedly/embedly-node
