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Actually the issue was the recent addition of gzipping the api response -- which doesn't play nicely with urllib2.urlopen. I am working on a patch that should resolve the issue.
Could you give me the full URL that you tried? If the app didnt crash in a blaze of fire, it's probably thinks that the URL is invalid (there is 'error checking' with a simple regex). Also what version are you running? The newest from github? The v0.3 tarball?
My understanding is that you should NOT copy the stackoverflow 'look and feel' which generally means things like colors/icons/layout. To me, this looks almost identical to the main sites and could easily cause confusion that is the 'official SO app'.