Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo is continually busy overhauling its entire team under the new CEO, while its user interface engineers ventured onto try out something that is little different and experimental. Yahoo today released a new Adobe-powered application called “Sideline,” that brings Twitter’s real-time search engine to the desktop.
Sideline, announced on the Yahoo user interface blog, the Adobe AIR powered application empowers users to create lasting real-time references to specific Twitter searches that can be grouped together in Sideline’s tabbed interface. It also has the potential to handle advanced queries like specific brand or names, and refreshes the application with new references automatically. How does it do this? It pulls keyword mentions from Twitter, of course!
The application is meant to be a display house for using Yahoo’s UI Library on top of Adobe AIR, and additionally it is best for real-time search client for Twitter in its own right, with a number of interesting advanced search features.
While the primary search in Sideline is indeed quite simple, the program’s advanced search provides you with a plethora of options, including searches for hashtags, exact phrases, and even a filter for messages with a positive or negative attitude.
The interesting part of the application is that all these search queries can be organized into separate tabs, so that you can, for example, create one search tab as a reference point of your own brand and products, and another one for keeping tabs on your competitors.
The actual application is simple and replicates much of the functionality of other Web-based Twitter apps, such as monitter. The effort of the application is notable for these primary reasons:
- Create a desktop application that allows for the creation, grouping, and auto-execution of advanced search queries against Twitter
- Leverage existing skill-sets and tools
- Target the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems and minimize the amount of platform specific code that must be written
- Open source the code so that others can learn from, contribute to, and/or extend the product as they see fit
- This approach could be a way to push Yahoo to desktops in the future.
- Twitter’s future business model most likely resides with analytic capabilities for businesses. However, Yahoo shows that it is quite possible that a third party can analyze and surface Twitter activity better than Twitter can.
It highlights and tracks keywords, is easy to search, and according to Yahoo, offers “20% more awesomeness.”
Because the app is squarely focused on Twitter search, it currently does not provide any of the Twitter client functions like writing tweets or responding to messages from within the app that you would expect from a more fully-featured Twitter client. Sideline, however, does give you the option to respond, though it takes you to Twitter’s Web interface to do so.
The Yahoo Sideline project seems to have stemmed out of an internal project over at Yahoo, the goal of which was to create a desktop application that utilized Twitter, would be compatible with Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux with minimal work, and did not require learning new programming languages. The result was an Adobe AIR application, which allows for the building of apps in Web-specific languages, such as PHP, HTML, and Javascript.
The Yahoo User Interface team also included in its announcement some suggestions for Adobe AIR app development, primarily that developers need to understand their programming environment and debugging tools are absolutely essential. Sideline is open source, so developers are welcome to play around with the code.
Yahoo says:
Our team of front-end engineers are experts in JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and PHP but did not have a great deal of experience developing desktop applications. So the question became, how to maximize our existing skill-sets for desktop development? The answer for us was to utilize the Adobe AIR platform, which “lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems”. Since AIR supports HTML/JavaScript development (in addition to Flex and Flash), we could build our application on traditional web technologies, on top of YUI, and have it run on the three main desktop operating systems.
Of course, to some extent, the real news here is not even so much so about the application by itself, but the fact that Yahoo is considering Twitter seriously, and that it has realized the power of Twitter search.