However, it seems like you ought to be able to use this mode to retrieve the events of anyone's journal (at least, those events that the logged-in user is allowed to see.) This could be really useful, allowing clients to assume functionality that's currently only possible from a Web browser. But if you try it, by putting a person's username into "usejournal", you get back an error saying you don't have access. It doesn't seem like there's anything preventing this from working other than a security check on the server. I wonder how hard this would be to fix?
While we were at it, this could also provide a way to access your "friends" page programmatically -- perhaps an extra parameter "friends" that when set to 1 means to access the events in the "friends" page of the target user, instead of the user's own events. If this were supported, I could immediately improve my Journalert app to notify the user not only that there were new friends postings, but also who had posted and what the subject was, simply by retrieving the latest friend posting.
I don't have the skills to begin to try to implement this in the server (I do C , Objective-C and Java, not Perl). Would someone care to work on this with me, doing the server work while I implement client functionality? I have a hunch it won't be hard to do, and it will allow clients to become much more powerful.