Lingr Blog

Lingr Radar - Be always on

We’ve been amazed and fascinated by the unexpected ways people have been enjoying Lingr. But we’ve noticed that, since the beginning, people haven’t liked to be alone in a chatroom, waiting for someone else to show up. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: Who’s going to be the first person in a room?

So we have attacked the problem both behind and in front of the scene. Today we’re releasing the Lingr API and something really cool: Lingr Radar.

Lingr Radar runs in the background and notifies you immediately when someone says something in any chatroom that you have marked for monitoring. (For techies, that means Lingr Radar speaks Comet just as browsers do. Yay!)

Moreover, it lets you maintain a presence in chatrooms so that other people know that, even though you're not there at the moment, you’re paying attention, and you’ll be notified as soon as they say something.

Of course you’re now able to write your own software like Lingr Radar using our new API. We hope Lingr Radar will inspire you to do so.

Also, we are very happy to announce that a fourth member has joined in our team: Satoshi Nakagawa.

If you’re Japanese, you might know him as an IRC guru: He developed LimeChat, the most popular IRC client software in Japan. And now he has built Lingr Radar, while living in a time zone 17 hours ahead of San Francisco. He’s also an ex-NeXT dude, so... you know what he’s working on next?

We’ve been eagerly awaiting this release for the past couple of months and are thrilled to finally share Lingr Radar with you. We hope you love it!

Happy Lingr-ing!

- Kenn

The Lingr API is born

Today we are proud to announce a new release of Lingr that includes the new Lingr API.  The Lingr API is a simple, HTTP-based REST protocol that enables anyone to interact with, extend, and mashup Lingr in whatever wacky way they want.

You could use the  Lingr API to write an application to monitor activity in chatrooms and notify you when your friends are chatting (whoops, we already did that), to create a chat-bot that automatically responds to other chatters, or anything else you can think of.  Really, the possibilities are endless!

In conjunction with the API's release, we have also established the Lingr Developer Wiki.  There you'll find full documentation on the API, along with tutorials, sample code, and more.  Being a wiki, we  hope that Lingr API developers will add their own content and create a community where people can find interesting new Lingr API applications, as well as get help in writing their own.

Finally, we're also publishing a Ruby Lingr API toolkit in our public subversion repository, along with some sample Javascript code demonstrating how to use the Lingr API from within a web page.  Using the Ruby Lingr API toolkit, a Ruby programmer can be up and talking to our API in just a few minutes time.

We hope you enjoy the Lingr API and we're looking forward to many unexpected and wonderful applications to grow up around it!

- Danny

Interview at sfruby.org

Chris Wanstrath over at sfruby.org has published an interview he did with Chris and I.  The interview contains some juicy bits about our upcoming API release, as well as 80's metal bands, so, please, check it out!

- Danny

Scheduled Downtime

We will be deploying a major release tonight, with some really exciting new features (Lingr API, anyone?).  While our deployments normally take only a few minutes, this one might take a bit longer due to its complexity. 

For that reason, please expect Lingr to be down from 8pm to 9pm PST tonight (04:00 to 05:00 UTC).  We hope the deployment will not take nearly that long, but, we like to be overly cautious with our estimates.

UPDATE

We have delayed the release until 10pm-11pm PST tonight (06:00 to 07:00 UTC).