From today there's a new option in your twitterscribe account settings - reminders for tweet milestones!
If you're close to hitting a milestone, say 20,000 tweets, @tscribe will reply to you with a reminder.
It's turned on by default so if you're not interested, login and turn it off.
Hello friends. It's been a long time coming, but Twitterscribe 2.0 has arrived, and it's better than ever. Let's take a look at what's changed.
No more need to give away your username and password — we're now using Twitter's recommended authentication method, which means you can feel safe about your login details, and we don't need to worry about having access to them either.
You can now see on your home page a graph of all your tweets, faves and retweets by month.
This is a big one. No more do you need to download your tweets to find that thing you said about cats in April last year! Just search for "cats", select the time period, and there it is. You can search across faves and retweets as well, and even choose to only find tweets containing links. Pretty handy, right?
Yes, now you can save all of your official-retweets as well. Make sure you turn this on when you sign up, or in your account settings.
If you're an existing user, just sign in and all your old tweets should be in there, ready to search and export.
If you're not already a user, then just sign in anyway, and we'll start the process of saving everything you tweet, favourite and retweet. We've got it in the bag/jar.
Hey there users. It's time for you to give me some more feedback. What feature should I add to Twitterscribe next? It's always nice to know what people appreciate the most, so I'd love if you took the poll below so I can see inside your lovely minds.
The day has come. Twitterscribe is opening itself wide and letting you all come in (though we're still in beta). Hooray! Let us feast on lambs and sloths and orangutans!
It's been a learning experience. With a small team of beta users, I've been forging bravely into the depths of the unknown, solving new and difficult problems in clever and interesting ways, but above all emerging triumphant.
Well, not really. There wasn't a lot to do really, nor a lot required of the beta boys and girls, as I just wanted to get an idea of the scale of the data.
Once I had a few users I started to rebuild the site more sensibly and add in scope for more functionality in the user area. Version one of the site was extremely limited and only let you export all tweets to CSV, so I needed to rectify this — but I had to build in the capacity to do new stuff first.
So over the last few months I've redesigned the user area, added in some more sensible functionality here and there, and finally added the ability to generate PDFs of your tweets.
The main thing now is to see how the site scales. With 58 users, the database currently stands at 147,600 tweets, and is around 25 meg. Obviously it's possible we're going to get completely overwhelmed with even smallish numbers of users, so I'm really holding my breath on this one. I'm no DBA so success may very well cause more troubles than joy.
Here are some things I've fixed since the last blog post:
Everything that I've mentioned in the previous post but not completed is still up for grabs. I think I owe it to you guys to get oAuth happening so I don't need your password, but after that anything could happen. Hoewever, I'm currently very close to having books ready to go so I imagine it won't take long before that rears its lovely, custom printed, hard-covered head.
By the way, if you want an idea of what a book of your tweets might look like, check out this excellent post.
I really hope you like the service. Tell all your friends. Tell your mum. Think of how awesome your own book could be.
And please, go easy on me. Like Mr Twitpic, this is a one-man service and bugs, outages and facepalming will be inevitable.
What follows is the contents of an email I sent to all beta users a few weeks ago:
Hello Twitterscribe beta user. I hope you don't mind that I'm emailing you. I realised that because of the very basic nature of the current site, I have no blog, no news section, and no way to let you know what's going on. If anything. So please forgive me if I'm intruding. Let me know if you don't want any occasional email updates and I will make sure you don't get any. There shouldn't be too many anyway, because by the time there's something to report again, it may well be the fact that there is A Blog and email updates are unnecessary.
First off, thankyou ever so much for signing up to this crazy ride. I couldn't have done it without you. Well, I could've, but it would have been kinda pointless. So thankyou for signing up, and sitting back letting your tweets roll in to my database. Our database.
Now I'd like to address one thing that you're probably all thinking:
I've been developing the site in Python as a nice little project to pick up more of the language, as I'm usually a PHP guy. But that means it's harder to just knock out updates. Also not helpful is the fact that I sort of screwed up my local dev version (long story), and I will probably have to rebuild it. So I've been putting that off, which means you guys haven't had any new Twitterscribe goodness. Sorry.
But! When I do get the ball rolling again, there's plenty to add...
There are all sorts of things that should be in there. Some are easy, others less so. Here's a list, in probable chronological order:
Keep in mind that there's plenty of space in here for anything you, my friend, might come up with. If you have ideas please whisper them in my ear.
Please let me know if you have ideas, concerns, or don't want to hear from me any more. Come on, tell me. I can take it.
Otherwise, hope you're enjoying Twitterscribe. Look out for new awesomeness when I get around to it.
