theChrisWalker.net

So, got decided to join most of my friends and I got an Xbox 360. Me being me though, I got interested in the way that all the information about your “Gamertag” is stored an accessible on the xbox.com website. Wouldn’t it be fun to do something with this data!

As it turns out, I was beaten to the post by Duncan MacKensie (http://duncanmackenzie.net/Blog/put-up-a-rest-api-for-xbox-gamertag-data) who hosts a webservice to retrieve gamer data from Microsoft. I could find no details about how this service works, where the data comes from or anything! Either he has a relationship with Microsoft, or he scrapes xbox.com but either way, the data seems pretty consistent and reliable. Actually it turns out this information was right there on his website… http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/Blog/if-you-are-wondering-where-i-get-my-xbox-live-info So he gets it as part of his membership to the Xbox Community Developer Program.

However, the webservice is great, and returns XML which is fine, but I thought it would be more useful to me to have a PHP API for this data. So I wrote one which retrieves data from Duncans webservice.

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I had heard about Google Wave, had a quick look at their UI, thought “shiny” and not really paid it much attention. Then I was reminded of it again recently and so I had another look, watched the Keynote Speech that they gave at the Google I/O 2009 and had a bit of a look around the web for related articles.

And I got really excited and really angry.

I got angry, because most people weren’t excited for the right reasons, or were dismissive / “anti” because they didn’t really see what Google has done.

But because I am so excited about Wave (not just Google Wave), I thought I’d post this to help you understand what Google Wave actually is and what it isn’t.

What Google Wave isn’t

Google Wave isn’t Wave.

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