Permanent Tourist

coll8, named as an abbreviation of the English word “collate”, allows users of the WordPress publishing software to provide website visitors with a page which collates all of their social media streams into one place: from Twitter and Flickr to Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube and Google Reader. Further services can be added fairly simply as required; the links page here at Permanent Tourist shows the most recent updates from the services I use most frequently. The standard implementation loads new data from a remote data server automatically once per hour, whereupon JSON data is automatically cached. This ensures reliability and maximum performance when dealing with a third-party data provider and helps to ensure 100% data availability.

A future development of the coll8 system will be to provide a standalone data collation server. The reliability of third-party service Friendfeed, from which data is currently drawn, has been brought into question and the system presents a few issues which cannot be resolved optimally. Therefore, my own equivalent will take over soon.

coll8 is currently a work in progress and only available to a select handful of friends in the short term. The initial version of the system, which gains its information from third party service Friendfeed, has already been implemented to the Burson-Marsteller EMEA websites in the guise of BM Talk, which I developed through my day job for the Swiss-based Crossmedia team.

Websites currently using coll8