Cult Of Ego Comes To iPhone
8:41 am, January 6th, 2009, Giles Turnbull
Geek blogger Chris Pirillo now has an iPhone application dedicated to him and all his prolific output: Follow Chris (iTunes Store link) is a single-person feed scraper and aggregator that pulls together content from Pirillo stuff posted on his personal site, Twitter, Lockergnome and the Geeks forum. That’s a lot of Pirillo.
But why?
I contacted developer Peter Birch (who, coincidentally, is based not far from me in Bristol) and asked him.
He told me it was just to make it easier to read all the Pirillo content that’s out there.
“I’ve been following Chris and his writing for about 12 months now. I like his stuff. Every day I wanted to see what was new and that meant checking a bunch of feeds or web sites. I just wanted to make it quicker and easier.”
So, for his very first iPhone app, Peter (normally a designer created something that aggregates a selection of feeds and puts them all together in an attractive app.
Sensibly, Peter did tell Chris what he was doing.
“I’ve told Chris about it and he thought it was a good idea. He’s given me some interesting suggestions for other apps.”
Indeed. It strikes me that this kind of single-subject or single-person aggregator might become very popular on the App Store. It would be trivially easy to build something for the internet superstar of your choice. A-list bloggers, this would be the perfect way to further inflate your already over-large egos.
Like I said, I rather think this kind of “ego app” will be very popular. If we’re lucky, it might even put the fart apps in the shade. Let’s hope so.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in News, Software, iPhone | Comment on this article
So does that mean I will soon be able to follow Giles on my iPhone? Maybe we should get Peter to build a Follow the Cult of Mac app. Oh, wait. You don’t need a special appp to follow the Cult.
Never mind.
Lonnie Lazar, on January 6th, 2009 at 10:52 am