Gather provides virtual spaces where people can hang out. Similar to the old Guild houses in MMORPGs, Gather provides a customizable virtual world for you and your friends, teams, or any other group you can think to meet online. They provide a limited HTTP API, and are planning to add Web Sockets at some point. While I need Web Sockets for most of the things I’m interested in doing with it, I’ve started playing with the current APIs to learn more about generated map making scenarios.
I did a very small project demo where I get a list of JSON endpoints and generate them into a map (name, tooltip). When you hit X while standing on top, it highlights the related endpoints for you automatically. Ideally, this would happen without any need for user interaction or website embeds (the hack I found for this), but at the moment it’s interesting enough to stand there and think about what else could be done. Broadcasting demos ? A walkable tour of a company’s API? Sitting down with friends to explore technical docs while showing each other the work? Who knows. I’m eager to find out if there’s something here that would help teams learn together.
The SDK Repo is here, please don’t use it for anything serious, I’m just playing around with ideas, it doesn’t even have tests, and I’m not sure if I’ll keep at it or wait for Web Sockets since IDK if this API is going away entirely or not (this point re deprecation, while very obvious, just occurred to me now).
Alt text: I do a walking tour of endpoints, then show the highlight functionality and some code decisions so far (it’s all prototype-y, of course)
@rowasc! 