Notes from a wireframe world

Today, after a fair amount of testing and racking my brains debugging with well revived help of martygoldberg [1] [2] I’ve managed to finish and add to TwitterBrite, what I’m calling “TwitterBrite as a service”. WHAT I hear you scream software as a service! Thats a cloud thing! You’ve ranted against cloud computing.

Well firstly, I’m not against cloud computing, I just don’t think it’s everything to everyone. Secondly “TwitterBrite as a service” has nothing to do with cloud computing.

What it does have a lot to do is removing one of the drawbacks of desktop RSS to twitter clients.

With cloud based twitter clients, such as co-tweet and Hootsuite, you can post your RSS feed to their site and walk away. The tweets will keep being processed if your their or not. However with TwitterBrite you have to fire it up, leave it eating up memory, while your not using it as a client your just posting RSS feeds…

But not any more! Windows allows you to have programs called services, which sit in the background, using only very limited resources and they can be started when you start windows up; as you may well have guessed, thats exactly what TwitterBrite as a service is, a very small windows servers that uses the same database as the main TwitterBrite application but runs in the background.

As of today the TwitterBrite API (to search for twitter users interested in a topic, as well as add or remove throses users from the database) is now public.

Full details can be found on the TwitterBrite site and I hope to be putting some client library’s out their (for .net and PHP initially) soon.

Version 1of TwitterBrite finally got it’s release today. Other than a strange and silly little bug that makes it look like it’s broken (and that should be fixed soon) it done.

While you can’t yet buy adverts on it (well you can’t the back end works, their’s just no way to access it yet), you can buy the application it’s self for just £25.

But whats more dear readers, since I love you all so much, I’m going to offer it to you at half price. All you need to do is use the coupon “HP50” when you buy it and you can get the pro version for just £12.50

Firstly Happy new year!

Sorry it’s been a while, however I’ve been busy writing code for a new project called TwitterBrite. It’s a twitter client for windows, that similar to applications like hootsuite allows users to post RSS feeds to twitter and search it for useful people to follow, however it solves one of the major drawbacks I see with hootsuite, that of security.

Hootsuite is a purely web based application, if something goes wrong with it (for example it starts re-posting old RSS entries, or spamming your followers with direct messages) their is nothing you can do about it, sure you can login and terminate your account, but as happened to a couple of services last year, what if you can’t login?

Control is I believe one of the biggest stumbling blocks for company wishing to access the power of social media, the what if something goes wrong argument.

Anyway as part of this project, I’ve been working on a .net based DLL that provides an interface for the Bit.ly URL shorten (which TwitterBrite will use) you can download it and a, hopefully useful, read me file from us here.

P.S. The DLL isn’t open source, however if you want the code, drop me a line. If you’re a business and want to keep it close source, I’m willing to sell it, providing I get a free life time upgrade/resell permissions for my products, if you’re interested in making it open source, that fine as well, just as long as you can show your going to move the interface forward.