Screenshot of the new polymorphic event stream

Quoddy is getting a polymorphic event stream!

The big news from Quoddy land currently is that support for polymorphism in the event stream is largely in place. "What," you might be asking, "does that mean, exactly?" Well, simply put it means that different "kinds" of events can show up in the event stream now, and each event will render (display) differently (and appropriately) based on it's attributes.

For example, one event might be a simple text based status update from a friend. That will display the words the friend wrote, their profile avatar and the time they posted and that's about it. But the next event in the stream might be a link to a scheduled event from your Meetup.com iCal feed. Since it's a calendar event, it will render with a an iCal icon, the start date/time of the event, the end date/time of the event, the location, and a hyperlink to the Meetup.com event.

Similarly an event might be a document shared from Google Docs or something, and it would, again, render seamlessly into the event stream, but with the exact details, links and controls that are appropriate for the event. This is really slick stuff, and coupled with AJAX callbacks to the server, allows us to embed any manner of interactivity right into the event stream.

Somewhere down the road we might look at incorporating GoogleApache Wave functionality here, so you can do collaborative editing "in place" from the stream.

We'll have some screenshots of this stuff up soon.