#kynetx

Introducing Personal Event Networks

Today Twitter announced a new widget that makes it easy to start following someone from their own site. The follow button is launching today with 50 partner sites and have provided the necessary code for anyone to embed the follow button on their own site. You can find the code here.

It won't be long before there are thousands of Follow buttons embedded on websites everywhere. But why stop there? With Kynetx you can embed the Follow button onto any website (on a Facebook profile page, PeerIndex profile page, Klout, etc.). Here's your challenge, the developer to build the most compelling application that uses the Twitter Follow button by Sunday June 5th will win $300.

Webmasters are already embedding the Follow button on their own sites, so come up with ways to use the Follow button beyond that. Get creative, think of the many ways you have wanted to start following a user without jumping over to Twitter.com to do it.

Get crackin', we are excited to see what you build! If you have questions or need help ask on StackOverflow tagged KRL or the Convore Kynetx Group. Once you're done, submit your app here by June 5th at 11:59pm PST.

-Brad

UPDATE: I won the contest! Now I don't have to wait in line to get my new iPad2. With 5 minutes to spare, I just submitted my entry to the Kynetx + Mashery contest. It's a bookmarklet that allows you to select some text on a page (e.g. an album title), and then it'll go off and snag the top search result from Rdio, which gets displayed in a little notification window with two links for listening and full details.

Before I get into all the fine print and boring technical stuff, give it a shot. Just drag the following link to your bookmarks bar, select an album title somewhere on the internets, and click the bookmark: Find it on Rdio Please drop me a note with your feedback. I didn't find out about the contest until a few days ago. By happy chance, Rdio had just released their API via the fine folks at Mashery. I love how quick it is to sign up for new APIs once you have a Mashery account. So here's what's going on behind the scenes: - If the bookmarklet is clicked and there's no text selected, you get a simple Javascript alert. If there is text selected, - Kynetx triggers a call to YQL, using an Open Data Table I created for searching Rdio. I can just send my key, secret (both of which are tucked away in the Kynetx app), and search terms to YQL, and it handles all the esoteric oAuth request signing, which Rdio requires even if you're making a call the doesn't require authentication. YQL is also doing some nice limiting and trimming of the results (not to mention caching), so things move along as quick as possible. - If we've found no results, a little notification tells you so. If we do have a result, the album art and two links are embedded in a default "notifier" box, which is one of the handy built-in Kynetx UI bits. If you click the "Listen now" link, - Kynetx makes yet another call, this time directly to the Rdio oEmbed API to get the HTML code we need for the embedded player. The main notification disappears and a slide-on-hover sidetab appears in its place.