gistfile1.txt

Hi, I just had an interesting discussion in an IRC chatroom about pastebots. Is
there any chance that a few features could be added to the Gist service? I'm
thinking:

1.) Tagging.

If people can attach tags to a Gist (preferably when they post it, whether
adding new tags to an existing gist could be a user-preference thing and/or a
checkbox) then the second idea I have becomes much easier. That idea is...

2.) Topic-based RSS/Atom/What-have-you feeds.

This would build on tagging to make it possible to build pastebots. A bot could
poll RSS feeds, or maybe have some sort of async update system like XMPP, and
recieve events when a Gist is labeled with a tag that they are watching for. The
latter would probably be significantly less bandwidth-intensive.

So for instance, if I'm in #perl6 on Freenode, and we have a pastebot named
'gist-lister' which is subscribed to the 'rakudo', 'perl6' and 'parrot' tags,
it'll notify us when a new paste has one or more of those tags.
(Case-sensitivity decisions are up to you.)

It probably would be nice, although not _necessary_, if GitHub could filter for
only the unique ones, but that would really only work for an async/XMPP-style
notification system, not RSS. Or feeds could be generated on-request and cached,
which would permit a single feed subscribed to multiple tags. I'm really making
this up as I go along.

Another option for the feed things is to only allow a single tag per Gist, which
would mean filtering Gists for uniqueness would be unnecessary.

Thank you for your time!