Web Service APIs Need “Last Read” Counter
I tend to split my time using Twitter and blog reading tools between mobile access clients and desktop web tools. Unfortunately for most of these activities there is no way to keep the view consistent between the mobile and desktop views. This could be solved by adding a “last read” value to the APIs and databases of these services.
With Twitter, I use TweetDeck on my desktop and several apps on my iPhone (Tweetie, Twittilator Pro). Unfortunately my iPhone apps have no idea what I’ve read on TweetDeck and vice versa. It would be nice to have a synchronized view so that if I’ve already read something in TweetDeck it would scroll past it when I open my feed on my phone. From what I can see the Twitter API does not support that. It should.
With blog readers it’s an even bigger problem. I use Bloglines as a desktop blog reader. I don’t care for the Bloglines mobile site, however, so I use Newsstand on my iPhone. My time for blog reading is very limited and I am not able to keep on top of all the subscriptions I have. From time to time I have to simply mark everything as read and start over.
It would help if I could have my desktop and mobile blog reading environments synchronized. Although Newsstand is completely independent of Bloglines, it would be nice of the Bloglines API would support a query that would return what I’ve read on Bloglines and allow the mobile newsreader to update that information as I read entries on my phone or other newsreading client.