---
title: "MyDreamApp disappointments and Hijack"
date: 2006-10-26T12:56:30-04:00
url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2006/10/26/mydreamapp-disappointments-and-hijack/
author: Les Orchard
tags: [metablogging, rss, mydreamapp, hijack, atom, forums, usenet]
---

# MyDreamApp disappointments and Hijack

<blockquote cite="http://digg.com/apple/MyDreamApp_3_Winners_Announced">After five grueling rounds, the MDA winners have been announced. Let the development begin!</blockquote><div class="quotesource">Source: <a href="http://digg.com/apple/MyDreamApp_3_Winners_Announced">digg - MyDreamApp, 3 Winners Announced!</a></div>

Spoiler alert - the winners are [Cookbook][cb], [Portal][po], and [Atmosphere][at].  Pretty disappointing, since my faves were [Hijack][hi], [Whistler][wi], and [Desktop Wars][dw].  Of course, I didn't do anything other than vote and occasionally forum-lurk.

Which, matter of fact, is why [Hijack][hi] was my top favorite of all.  I've gotten a lot of read-only coverage of the web from my news aggregator, but I've never ever been able to get into web-distributed forum groups.  Some have RSS feeds, but most don't and I never remember to revisit them.  I love the power of the web, and I love distributed apps - but sometimes I miss Usenet.

Seems like there's a need for Atom-ized comments - that is, a data format for forum aggregators to read and an API for reply submission with spam resistance.  Hijack featured forum HTML scraping as a proposed feature - but what if you could get adoption for some simple plugins for [Wordpress][wp], [phpBB][pbb], [Vanilla][va], etal?  [co.mments][co] seemed promising, but I've just not gotten into it much.  I need to do some poking around to see who is already working on this.

[co]: http://co.mments.com/
[wp]: http://wordpress.org/
[pbb]: http://www.phpbb.com/
[va]: http://getvanilla.com/
[dw]: http://mydreamapp.com/contestants/view/andrewwilson/
[wi]: http://mydreamapp.com/contestants/view/richardwhitelock/
[hi]: http://mydreamapp.com/contestants/view/kevincapizzi/
[at]: http://mydreamapp.com/contestants/view/cameronwestland/
[po]: http://mydreamapp.com/contestants/view/farzadsadjadi/
[cb]: http://mydreamapp.com/contestants/view/michaelyuan/

<div id="comments" class="comments archived-comments">
            <h3>Archived Comments</h3>
            
        <ul class="comments">
            
        <li class="comment" id="comment-221082986">
            <div class="meta">
                <div class="author">
                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://vjarmy.com/"><img src="http://disqus.com/api/users/avatars/RemyDWD.jpg"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://vjarmy.com/">Dan Dickinson</a>
                </div>
                <a href="#comment-221082986" class="permalink"><time datetime="2006-10-26T18:20:16">2006-10-26T18:20:16</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content"><p>It's funny; a week ago, something set me off on writing a "Why do we not have forum aggregators?!" post, and then a bit of googling led me to Hijack, and then the massive disappointment last night that it lost.</p>

<p>And then this morning, I was just thinking that it'd be easily doable in Atom.</p>

<p>I need to stop thinking in other people's blog posts.</p>

<p>(If you do get going on this, let me know.)</p></div>
            
        </li>
    
        <li class="comment" id="comment-221082988">
            <div class="meta">
                <div class="author">
                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://plasmasturm.org/"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=e17949267bbfe21a0fadf1bbf00592b4&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://plasmasturm.org/">Aristotle Pagaltzis</a>
                </div>
                <a href="#comment-221082988" class="permalink"><time datetime="2006-10-27T09:45:34">2006-10-27T09:45:34</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content"><p>This should be a pretty trivial job of stringing together the <a href="http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/" rel="nofollow">APP</a> and <a href="http://rfc.net/rfc4685.html" rel="nofollow">Atom Threading (RFC 4685)</a>.</p>

<p>(Hmm, where did your AJAX preview button go? I hope the Markdown links are interpreted properly…)</p></div>
            
        </li>
    
        </ul>
    
        </div>