Back in January, I noticed an intriguing idea from Jeff Jarvis : @twitcrit: instareviews. Basically to use the Twitter microblogging tool to post mini reviews. I couldn’t resist having a quick go at an implementation of what Jeff described. Fast mover that he is, Dave Winer got an implementation together ahead of me - see Jeff’s subsequent post.

Now programming skill doesn’t really come into this, the application is pretty straightforward, only took me a couple of hours to write my code. I assume Dave used his own platform based on Frontier, the service being maintained by himself. I used the Talis Platform. Although I work for Talis, I have nothing to do with the maintenance of the service - if effect I’m a 3rd party coding against a Web API (one based entirely on standard HTTP, but that’s another story).

Five months later, the twitcrit idea didn’t really catch on, and to be honest I’d pretty much forgotten about it. But checking back, my app is still live. Also in the meantime it’s been happily aggregating the data that’s passed through. I never got around to a proper search interface, but because the store is SPARQL-enabled, it is all searchable. Now check Dave’s version.

So my passing observation on SaaS is that in delegating infrastructure maintenance, you can just write your app and forget about it.

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