Unless you have been living under a rock for the past few years, you’ll have heard about the microblogging, status update site called Twitter. You can find updates of all the latest posts from Phreadz here @phreadz. Also you can find me kosso here : @kosso

One of the great things about Twitter is they have a very simple API (Application Programming Interface) which makes it pretty straight forward (with a bit of code-fu) to build your own client interface for the system.

Since the official Twitter interface for mobiles was (and still is) pretty dire, a guy called David Carrington (@davidcarrington) took it upon himself (with some help and nudging from James Whatley (@whatleydude) and Terence Eden (@edent) and build a great mobile client called ‘Dabr‘. It’s really great and works on most mobile devices you can think of - automatically reformatting iteself depending on the capabilities and screen size of the device.

A while ago, I had a look around the code for Dabr and saw that David had built some methods to be able to display images from certain image hosts (like Twitpic and Flickr) inline with tweets. I’ve always liked seeing a preview of what a link might be to on Twitter - especially with the proliferation of ‘url shorteners’ - so I decided to knock together some simple code using the Phreadz API to make it easy to integrate Phreadz with Dabr too!

Here’s a post from Terence Eden explaining a bit more about it.

By the way, as a side/hobby project, I’m building my own iPhone client for Twitter, called ‘nigel’ where I’ll also be using the Phreadz API to support inline viewing of all the places and media that Phreadz itself can support. Kind of a mashup really. Lots of fun!

Naturally, I’m also building an iPhone application for Phreadz, which 20 or so people are testing right now. I’m very excited about this, as it’s the first iPhone app I have built (along with ‘nigel’) and it uses the (soon to be documented and released) Phreadz posting API. But I’ll post more about that shortly.

Cheers for now!

Also, apologies for the lack of posts and updates over here on the blog. I’ve been working flat out on building Phreadz and will be getting back in to the blogging seat again, with a load of news and updates about what Phreadz is, what it can do and how you can build cool multimedia things with it

Yes, the Tribble’s out of the bag! Phreadz are in Sydney for the World Premiere of the new Star Trek movie directed by JJ. Abrams! We should be getting access to ask questions to JJ, Chris Pine (Captain James Tiberius Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock), Karl Urban (Bones), John Cho (Sulu) and Eric Bana (Nero), so come on over to the Star Trek channel, sign up for a Phreadz account and ask away! You can also use Twitter to ask a question, by adding the ‘hashtag’ #asktrek to your question.

We’ll be catching the action right from the red carpet (or should we call it the ‘Phread Carpet?’ )too, using a UStream embedded on the channel page and sending up as many clips and pix from the stars, stunners and trekkies at the event.

See you there!

Post, Share and Prosper!

UPDATE: Here’s a great blog post from Dan Light who made all this happen for us.