First of all, I’d settle for splitting the $40,000 prize. I’d enlist 2 other people, one on the other coast and one somewhere in the middle, and offer them $5000 apiece to play along. Each of us would have gotten up this morning and lofted 3 or 4 big red weather balloons of our own around San Francisco, Austin, and the DC area.

Then we’d have enlisted a couple of our high-flow Twitter buddies for another $2500 apiece to toss out the following offer:

The first person who sends me legit coordinates for a particular red DARPA balloon will be guaranteed $2500 of our winnings.

That means we’re out another $25000 for all 10 coordinates (obviously we aren’t paying for our decoys — they aren’t DARPA’s), for a total of $35,000. A few more posts around the net in our spare time, and bam! all 10 coordinates show up and everyone’s a winner.

I’d be surprised if anyone tries all the elements of this strategy, but it’s sure what I’d do. Fake out the competition and incentivize people who might not otherwise stand a chance at the $40,000 (and pocket $5000 for myself).

So, anyone seen any red balloons today? $2500 of my winnings if you have!

I learned a lot about the pros and cons of using Google App Engine while making my Java implementation of a rssCloud server, rssNimbus. It seems like a perfect platform for hosting a thin set of Twitter APIs that can form the basis of a hackable open source effort at giving Twitter a brain.

I’m going to start a SourceForge or Google Code project to host the Java code. As for collaborating on the proxy “language”, I’m open to suggestions. Google Docs? Wave? Mailing list?

Anyone who is interested in participating please drop me an email at “chuck -at- shotton dot com” or post a comment here.

Be forewarned that it still needs to be hooked into GAE’s cron processes so that hourly housekeeping can be performed (i.e., expiring subscriptions, pushing out delayed notifications, etc.)

Also, please note that as of this iteration, no subscriptions are being expired.

You can find a test version of rssNimbus at http://rssnimbus.appspot.com/ with additional instructions on its home page for using it. Please post any comments, issues, bugs, or feedback as comments to this post.

Once the final kinks are out of it and the basic UI is turned on for admin functions, a user-installable version of rssNimbus will be made available as a .zip archive for anyone who wants to take a shot at installing and running their own GAE-based rssCloud server. Hopefully that archive will be available this weekend, depending on feedback and last minute issues.