Huh. Just noticed in today's DreamWidth update that they are now allowing "cross-site reading" -- the implication being that you can integrate your LJ friendlist into your DreamWidth one. It's a feature that I *desperately* wanted in CommYou, but concluded was difficult-to-impossible at the time. So now I'm curious how DW is making it work. My suspicion is that there's been an API enhancement while I wasn't looking, and that's very intriguing: if the API now provides a good way to get at your flist, it might make a good Android LJ-reading client more plausible...
jducoeur
(I'd actually much rather they were still working in the same codebase, since that would imply that LJ has this functionality as well now. But it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that DW has long since forked...)
Mark, the DW technical founder, had already started DW by then, and significant enhancements to the code were always part of his plan. (Mark was a major volunteer contributor to LJ in college (and IIRC in high school too). LJ hired him straight out of college, while they were still in Portland and independent. He moved to SF with the Six Apart acquisition and at some point during the actively stupid management phase went to work for Google. LJ had initially been a labor of love for him, and DW is at least partly an attempt to get back to the ad-free, communitarian roots of the pre-Six Apart, pre-Russian, LJ.)
At any rate, LJ now occasionally picks up DW enhancements, but I don't think there's a lot of code going the other direction.
Not that I actually have any time for a new programming project right now, of course. But a part of me has been looking for an excuse to mess around with 'droid programming, and this would actually be useful...
Ha, sorry, the so-typical-of-LJ undocumented API call to get your friends page.
For a mobile client you can presumably make polling cheaper with the checkfriends method that fetches a new post count.
Dreamwidth development has been back and forth on whether this would actually be possible or not. It took a long time to get to the point where we could find an ethical way to access the data. And yes, it was made more difficult by the lack of technical documentation on LiveJournal's side. Dreamwidth tries to document stuff as much as possible; if you find something we haven't documented, please drop an email to support@dreamwidth.org and I'll do what I can to make that doc happen.
Nearly all of Dreamwidth's code is open source, so you are welcome to take a look at it. If you decide you'd like to poke around a little more in-depth, let me know and I'll put you in touch with Sophie. She takes care of our hosted development environments, which are there for you to hack on. If you have any questions at all, or even if you just want to stop in and say hello, you can do that by connecting to IRC: irc.dreamwidth.org port 6667, channel #dw or #dw_kindergarten.
Hope this helped!
Lady Katerinka Lvovicha of the Two Kingdoms aka Kat aka DW Support Guru :)
More immediately, like I said, this may well be really great for mobile environments. I've long been bothered by the asymmetry of UI support -- the fact that there are all these customized clients for *writing* posts, but you have to go back to the Web to *read* them. Knowing that this capability exists is terribly intriguing, because it suggests that one might be able to build customized clients that read as well as write. That could be mildly useful even on PCs, but might be huge for smartphones, where a truly customized UI could produce a much better experience...