Peter Elst

I’ve had one of the Jaxtr engineers contact me a little while back but unfortunately lost their contact details so thought I’d blog some of my thoughts on a Jaxtr API that would allow you to use the voice mail service as a means for audio commenting on a blog.

If you don’t know about Jaxtr you might want to read my initial review of the beta.

Basically what I believe is needed is a way to pass a unique reference to the badge so that when a voice mail message is left you can filter it by date and unique reference and put it in context of your blog post comments. In terms of an API there is nothing major there, we’d need one method, something like getVoicemailByReference, that returns an XML feed with links to all MP3 messages, the sender and a timestamp. Obviously there would need to be login authentication there (so use a server side script kids!)

<?xml version="1.0 ?>
<voicemail>
<message datetime="2007-02-23 05:50:10"
sender="Joe" audio="http://jaxtrserver.com/yourmessage.mp3" />
<message datetime="2007-01-22 18:20:34"
sender="Jane" audio="http://jaxtrserver.com/yourothermessage.mp3" />
</voicemail>

At first I thought this approach would be pretty straight forward but, thinking about how their service seems to be set up, I’m not sure if you could easily store a reference because there doesn’t seem to be a direct link between the badge and the call itself. They could also hardly give out a unique phone number per reference unless they’d use some extension code perhaps.

So what would work? I think feasibly it’ll need to be a process with some manual intervention. If Jaxtr is able to provide an RSS feed of the voicemail messages, it won’t be too difficult to write a little wordpress plugin or app around it (I’m thinking Apollo) that uses the blogger API so you can set the MP3 file as a comment for one or more of your posts.

I think that’d be pretty cool — what do you think?