Hacking Olinda

I was just ordering some moo stickers to customise my Olinda social radio after Matt and Jack discovered that the stickers fit perfectly in the little "window" for each friend. So I was thinking about what pictures I might use. And we've previously thought about one of the friend slots on Olinda actually being an automated recommendations robot - so the light goes on whenever a radio station is playing something you might like.

And I realised that you can hack Olinda. Maybe you want one of those friend lights to notify you of new email, or tweets, or your doorbell, or any other geeky alerts you might have. Or it could remind you that your plants need watering or that it's someone's birthday. Or as Matt Jones just tweeted "can you hack Olinda to switch over whenever George Lamb is on?". No comment.

And the way we've built it means that you can do this. There's a backdoor API to Radio Pop - the social listening service that Olinda uses to communicate with other radios. Basically you hit a particular URL with some data (sorry, can't tell you, it's secret) representing which Olinda this is and the station ID that you are listening to. But as Radio Pop is BBC only (for now), any non-BBC station IDs are not stored in Radio Pop but just get transparently passed on to any friends' Olindas. Now, Olinda won't know what to do with a random ID, but it doesn't matter, it will still turn the little light on. So I can go to Radio Pop, configure a dummy user to represent my alert, write a little script that pretends to be an Olinda and posts every time I want to be alerted, choose an appropriate sticker and sit back and wait for the light to go on.

Leave things a little bit open. Publish the APIs. And make things hackable.