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

Twitterbrite TR1 (Temporary release 1) is out now, however please read the notes as this is very much a beta version.

You may have noticed a nice little box below my posts (it only appears on each posts page, as opposed to the front page). this is provided by a new start-up called Smoopr, and provided you with a real-time streem (mostly from twitter I think) of what others are saying about what I write.

Due to its very early stage of development Smoopr users still need to manually copy and paste the code snippet into their blog or potentially any other online outlet. Herein lies a potential deal breaker for Smoopr. Add-ons and services where there is a need to install some widget within another web application should be as simple to implement as possible in order to reach a larger audience. It would therefore be smart to enable Smoopr to be used via various cross-browser add-ons and extensions as Zemanta already does.