I haven't done a thorough comparison of Yammer to Socialcast, but I know we tried Yammer first and didn't really like it. Perhaps someone else can chip in w/ a better comparison, but here are a few of the main things I love about Socialcast:
- The have a really great attention to detail in their UI
- You have lots of options for clients (web, desktop, iphone)
- Their API rocks

you define 'a' twice. while the regexp could obviously be altered to look for the last instance, it's better coding practice to to avoid ambiguous cases like that.

i have plenty of scars... so um, there must be something missing... maybe it's "chicks dig scars and cars" or something like that. :)

Sure, in PHP it looks like this. It's just a simple REST call:

function post_to_socialcast($message, $url = false) {
$socialcast_url = "https://SHORTCODE.socialcast.com/api/messages.json";
$message = "message[title]=".$message;
// link this message?
$message .= ($url) ? "&message[url]=".$url : "";

// curl options
$options[CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER] = 0; // important
$options[CURLOPT_USERPWD] = "EMAIL:PASSWORD";
$options[CURLOPT_POST] = 1;
$options[CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS] = $message;

single_curl($socialcast_url, false, $options);
}

Obviously you need to replace SHORTCODE, EMAIL and PASSWORD with your own values. This code uses my curl library that you can find at: http://www.onlineaspect.com/2009/01/26/how-to-use...

Hope that helps. Feel free to email me if you need more.

There's not much for me to show, but their API is super simple. I got our integration up and running in less than 10 minutes. I recommend you just dive in and try it out.

Ugh, my commenting system slaughtered the code example. Hopefully you can still get the gist of it.

Interesting question. The first thing that comes to mind is to use create_function (http://ca.php.net/create_function) to create an anonymous function for the callback. It's got a bit of an ugly syntax, but it works great. Using the example I have on Google Code, it would look something like this:

$callback = create_function('$response,$info', '
// parse the page title out of the returned HTML
if (eregi ("<title>(.*)</title>", $response, $out)) {
$title = $out[1];
}
echo "$title
";
print_r($info);
echo "<hr>";
');

$rc = new RollingCurl($callback);

Ah, good catch & shame on me for not noticing that first. It should be fixed now on Google Code.

The challenge with new features in browsers has always been around offering backwards compatibility. Sure you want to use that new video feature, but you still need to serve up flash to people with old browsers. You want to use web sockets, but you also have to implement a lame polling system to fall back on. Someday HTML 5 is going to be awesome, in the meantime, it's just going to be twice the work for anyone who cares about universal access. The big exception of course is the iphone where you are guaranteed a nice up to date browser.

Great self-reflective post. I second everything that Joel said.

I think being "overly principled" is a common struggle for engineers everywhere, but it's in startups where you really feel the cost of it.

Thanks for your openness to share this.