Stay informed with the news you want, when and how you want to receive it.
The Big Picture aka "The Vision"
trollcast is a messaging platform designed to share very discrete, targeted information with an audience that controls what, how and when it participates.
Sounds Impressive, What Does That Mean?
trollcast tells people when they should skip work to go skiing or snowboarding.
That's Pretty Blunt; Can You Expand a Bit?
You want to know about very specific things at very specific times and you want to control how you find out. You love skiing but have other commitments... like a job. Bottom line: you need to pick your powder sick days wisely. trollcast lets you know when the resorts you care about meet certain conditions (like 30+ cm snow in the past 24 hours), sends an update using your preferred mechanism (say, a text message) and follows your schedule (I need to know before 8am so I can call in sick). Tada! queue the jazz hands.
Or To Put It Another Way...
trollcast provides you with your own little troll butler, kind of like an Oompa-Loompa but more useful and way friendlier. Your troll gathers information that you care about, summarizes the good stuff and shares it with you. We house and feed your troll; you’re responsible for playing with the little guy (or gal) and letting them know what information you care about.
OK, I Understand. Now What?
It’s easy to get started, mostly because we’re in super-early pre-alpha semi-stealth mode and there’s not that much you can do:
- Adopt a troll and tell him/her how to contact you (phone #, email, etc). Your troll will send you a test message to validate your contact information.
- Subscribe to a channel - this is pretty easy with only the snow@troll channel available right now (lots more are in the works).
- Specify details about when/what/how your troll communicates with you.
- Wax your skis or board and wait for your troll to tell you to hit the slopes.
Channel? Subscribe? Trolls?
Software developers love metaphors because they allow us to shape our own alternative reality. We could never have this sort of power in a messy physical world full of edge cases and it feels really good to be in control. Beyond this self-serving purpose however, they do let us build a useful mental model to help illustrate the vision and guide development. Currently trollcast is mostly vision and as such is rife with metaphors.
Continuing with the snow@troll channel:
trollcast is a stream of channels. A channel (snow@troll) is an information topic with a narrow focus (snow conditions at ski resorts) and a specific purpose (tells skiers and boarders the best places and times to hit the slopes). Channels are made up of producers, who contribute and update segments (the conditions at a specific resort). A director moderates the channel to make sure everyone plays nice. Viewers (Users) like you Subscribe to channels they care about (though technically it’s your troll who does all the viewing, then gives you the equivalent of a 30-second summary of the good parts while sharing a coffee). It’s kind of like a big, happy, Internet-y PBS, plus a giant digital video recorder, because you tell your troll when talk (before midnight, or after 7am, or as soon as possible). Oh, and there's no TV involved, because you tell your troll how to communicate with you (a text message, an email, a status update, an automated telephone call). And trolls, there’s lots of trolls.
So maybe it’s not really like PBS, other than the participation of viewers like you.
More Details
You can check out the blog for more information.