We have just launched a new feature that allows you to publicly display your tarpipe activity.

The main difference from services that aggregate your feeds is that on tarpipe all the actions taken when executing a workflow will belong to the same context. This means that people watching your activity on tarpipe will always know that single actions on each service are part of a broader action giving them more meaning.

To activate this new feature, after you have signed in on tarpipe, go to your settings and fill the “Nickname” field, check the “Public activity” box, and don’t forget to save!

Now you can share your activity on http://dev.tarpipe.com/user/yournickname. As an example, check out what I’ve been doing lately: http://dev.tarpipe.com/user/vitor.

We are planning some exciting features for the public activity, and as usual we’d love to hear your suggestions!

Following a suggestion by Guillaume Riflet, we implemented a Geocoder connector and also added a tags input field to the existing Flickr connector.

The geocoder connector uses the Google Maps API Geocoding Service and, after you feed it with a location text, it will output different pieces of information:

• geoTags: geo:lat and geo:lon machine tags ready to be used by flickr;
• latitude;
• longitude;
• address: the complete address of the location you provided;
• locality: usually a city or a neighbourhood;
• postalCode;
• countryCode: a ccTLD two letter country code;
• country.

We hope you can take advantage of this new connector by geotagging your photos.

We’ve been trying the new XMPP-to-tarpipe gateway created by Pedro Melo, and we must say that we’re impressed with its ease of use and added value.

The XMPP gateway lets you publish content through any REST based workflow. Simply subscribe to <REST_token>@tarpipe.simplicidade.org and you can start publishing right away. More information can be found at Pedro Melo’s original blog post.

Expect more related developments on the near future.

We’ve just launched the friendfeed connector, letting you share items directly from your workflows. You can share text only items or images.

This workflow creates a gateway from email to friendfeed. You can use it as it’s shown here or add other connectors to spread your information to different services. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

We’ve just added the Tumblr service to our growing list of connectors. You can start using this connector on your workflows. For now, you’ll be able to post text articles on Tumblr, as we’re adding support for other media types soon.

You can, for instance, post an article on Tumblr, announce it on twitter and bookmark it on del.icio.us. All this by sending an email message or using our API to contact your workflow.

This week was mostly devoted to bug fixing, UI prototyping and improving the workflow management system.

Here’s a list of activities:

• The new workflow management system was launched, having numerous improvements over the previous version, including parallel execution;
• The TinyURL connector was launched.

Regarding the possibility of opening the connector development, we’ve listened to your suggestions and have decided on a model to follow, inspired by github’s services integration.

To avoid facing potential security issues, third-party connectors will only be able to communicate with OAuth capable services. More on this subject next week.

We’ve also been testing on variations of the workflow editing interface. With the growing number of connectors, the interface needs to be simplified.

Thanks for all the feedback.

Hello again. This week we finally deployed our OAuth library, making possible the development of OAuth based connectors.

Here’s the activity list:

• Ruben Fonseca and Tiago Pinto joined forces and launched the TarPipe API for Ruby;
• Alcides Fonseca launched Dropipe, the first tarpipe desktop application;
• The Jaiku connector was launched;
• The Pownce connector was launched, being our first OAuth based connector.

We’ve been getting a lot of requests to let outside developers implement and deploy their own connectors. We’re currently studying a possible solution and will come back with news about this next week.

Thanks for all your suggestions and bug hunting.

Hello everybody, it’s time for a wrap-up of what we’ve been doing lately. Besides small bug fixes and interface tweaks we used your suggestions about new services when choosing which connectors to launch.

So, here’s a list of activities for the passing week:

• The flickr connector was launched;
• The del.icio.us connector was launched;
• José Silva launched the Tarpipe.com PHP API, adding it to the previously launched Perl and Python implementations;
• We’ve created the tarpipe workflows flickr pool dedicated to workflow screenshots;
• We’ve created the tarpipe Google Group, a place to discuss and share thoughts about tarpipe.

Next week we’re moving into OAuth based services and adding more improvements to the user interface.

As before, if you have any suggestions, please let us know. Thanks!

We just released the flickr connector. From now on you can use it inside your workflows.

I’m sure you have plenty of workflow ideas, but here are two suggestions:

1. Send a picture from mail to flickr and announce it on twitter;
2. Send a picture to flickr and photobucket in one step.

To start using it, you need to give tarpipe permissions to upload pictures to your flickr account. As before, you can do that on the accounts tab.

tarpipe is co-sponsoring the First International Erlang eXchange 2008, which will be held on June 26th-27th. This conference is aimed at anyone interested in Erlang, concurrent and sequential programming.

Here’s a partial speaker list:

• Joe Armstrong — Erlang creator;
• Jan Lehnardt — CouchDB;
• Matthias Radestock — LShift;
• Simon Thompson — Wrangler.

Tickets go at GBP 300/delegate for 2 days, packed with workshops and sessions. Please use the promo code ERLA-TAR3130 when you register to get a Go! Gameboard with your Erlang eXchange ticket.