Opening up access to NY Senate info via Twitter and IM using Voxeo’s IMified
June 29th, 2009 by Dan YorkTweet
In a very cool demonstration of what you can do with the IMified platform, you can now use either IM or Twitter to find out the status of bills in the New York state senate.
Shortly after we announced the acquisition of IMified, independent developer Mark Headd let us know he was excited to give it a try for some of the “open government” projects he works on and documents on his VOX POPULI blog. On June 18th, he put up a great example: Building an IM Bot for the NY Senate OpenLeg API where you can simply send a Jabber/GoogleTalk IM message to:
opensenate@bot.im
with a New York Senate bill number in it and get back the status of that bill.
When we added Twitter support to IMified last week, Mark quickly added a Twitter ID to his service so that now you can simply send a Twitter “@” message to “@opensenate” with the same kind of request. You can see some of the interaction so far on the twitter.com/opensenate page.
Mark has nicely made available in his blog post the sample PHP code for his IMified bot. Mark has also been exchanging comments with Nathan Freitas from the New York Senate CIO team. It’s very cool to see that Mark was the very first external user of the NY Senate API. (Congrats, Mark!)
It’s all great work and we’re pleased to see what Mark has done with the platform.
Two other comments:
- I was not personally aware of this NY Senate openness initiative, but from this article, “5 Open tenets of the new NYSenate.gov“, it sounds like some excellent work. (Note to NH state gov’t: can I get access like this, too, please?)
- How great is it to have the NY Senate CIO office posting their open source code and API documentation on Github! Great to see.
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Technorati Tags: ny, nysenate, open, open government, government, voxeo, imified
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- Free Developer Jam Session webinar on Oct 7th – Build multi-channel apps that work across voice, SMS, IM, web and Twitter
- Voice Mashups with Twitter, part 2: Sending telephony presence to Twitter
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June 29th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Thanks for the shout out!
I must say, I’m pretty impressed with the IMified platform, and all of the power it provides to connect with end users on multiple IM networks. The Twitter support really takes it to another level.
I have lots of plans, and things I would like to do to enahance the OpenSenate service:
1. Build out the use of the NYSenate API, to allow search of bills by subject and to get a list of bills by sponsor. 2. Embed a URL to the bill summary in Tweets and IMs from the OpenSenate service 3. Create a voice interface for the service (using VoiceXML, or perhaps Tropo). 4. Add some more of the IM networks supported by IMified
So much to do – so little time. ;-)