Thinking Realtime at Culture Hack Scotland

I’m going to be at Culture Hack Scotland tomorrow (Saturday 28th April) and I’m excited to see what the attendees will have hacked together overnight. So, I thought I’d share a few thoughts about how Pusher can help and about the prizes we’re offering.

There are a bunch of interesting datasets available which is a great way to get people thinking about innovative ways to use the data. Whilst great applications can be built upon static datasets, what can really make an application come alive is how interactive and engaging it is. This is where I believe Pusher can help.

Note: Although I’m not physically in Glasgow today and tonight (Friday 27 April) I’m available to help via support@pusher.com and via @leggetter on Twitter. Please don’t hesitate to give me a shout

Desktop browsers, mobile browsers and native applications

How can you use Pusher at Culture Hack Scotland?

A few examples of the types of interactive and engaging functionality that Pusher makes it easy to add to web and mobile applications are:

• Notifications – simple realtime notifications to make users aware that new data is available, data has changed, a new comment has been made
• User interactions – e.g. realtime chat between users who are viewing the same piece of information or visualisation
• Collaboration – e.g. multiple user working together to compose something
• Visualisations – This requires some realtime data, but it’s amazing how realtime visualisations can even make Justin Bieber interesting (to those who otherwise wouldn’t be)
• Multiplayer Games – gaming is all about user interaction and immersing users in engaging gameplay. You can even turn what could be classed as a pretty standard, but massively popular, board game into a massively multiplayer game with an endless world (of places for tiles).
• Interactive Exhibitions – It’s important to remember that you’re not restricted to a computer screen. As well as mobile driven displays there’s almost no limit to what can be controlled with WebSockets and Pusher.

Why should you use Pusher?

We’ve found that our API is very well suited to hack events because it’s so simple and fast to get up and running. It’s possible to push information from your application server to the client in as little as 9 lines of code (client and server). There’s no installation or server configuration required. This means less faffing and more hacking.

Pusher is also a very complementary API. We provide that last-mile delivery of data from the server to clients. This means that we work really well with other datasets and APIs like Twilio, DataSift, SoundCloud, Superfeedr, Twitter and many more.

Swag & Prizes

Oh, yeah: and we’re going to give away a bunch of t-shirts and £500 worth of free accounts. So, I’ll be on the look out for the best uses of realtime and Pusher.

The very best of luck to everybody at Culture Hack Scotland. Hopefully a few of you will be in touch today/tonight and I look forward to getting involved tomorrow.