Just a few days ago (on the 6th of Nov. to be exact) Webjam 9 occured here in Perth as a part of WA Web Week (and more specifically, after Edge of the Web on the same day). Having missed out last time they came to town, I took this webjam as a chance to prototype an idea and show it off.

I built Kookaburra - basically, a simple twitter-like service running on top of a customized IRC daemon (built as a fork of ruby-ircd) which lets users use a twitter like experience (web UI, twitter apps, hashtags and @replies) as a nice little way to interact with an irc server.

In other words, we let the geeks be geeks (i.e. use the old way, IRC) and those who just want something normal to interact with it. First, my presentation:

In other words. IRC + Twitter + some Ruby magic == awesomeness. For example, my demo should of been this (rushed in to about 2 minutes - giving one for my actual presentation) and mind all of the extra talking...

Neat, eh? So, on to the interesting stuff.

The future

Given I've now demoed it and let people in on what I'm building, I figure it's best to give a bit of insight in to when I actually plan on releasing it. For a start, the the irc server is already up on github (I won't link to it, I'd like to avoid people forking it just yet) and I plan on open sourcing much of the rest of the app when I've had some time (over the two weeks) to solidify the idea.

With that said and done, I have much grander plans than this little demo (some of which won't be open source :(), some of which I hope to build upon in the next year or so. With that said and done, there'll be stuff for people to play with very, very soon - I hope to make IRC a tiny bit cooler.

Problems

The biggest problem with all of this is related to the fact to make it work in a semi-twitter like fashion, I've had to bastardise the server a little bit (to the gods of the internet, I'm sorry). For example, messages appearing in chats from users who aren't recorded as members and stuff like that. The solution here is to basically work on the server itself to better support this stuff and hopefully that'll also be done relatively soon.

As twitter found out, building microblogging apps is easy but making them scale isn't. The biggest issue other than the aforementioned IRC-bastardisation is finding a way to efficiently store past messages - at the moment, it's stored in memory on the server (which isn't ideal). I'll be working at this when I can and hopefully the solution will be relatively simple.

In other words

it's a neat demo, it works well enough to use and I plan on completely open sourcing it once I've built something a bit more solid. For the moment, enjoy what you've seen. If you want more information, follow me on twitter or subscribe to this blog. I'll announce on both once I have a working demo and some more news on the other cool stuff I'm working on. Of course, none of this would of been as fun if I hadn't of used ruby, merb, ruby-ircd and a bunch of other cool stuff.

Lastly, thanks to all who I'd talked to and got help / support from whilst developing as well as those who voted for me (to get 2nd place and a kick ass $200 JB Hifi Gift Voucher). Even more so, thanks to the Webjam Crew for such an awesome event.