groovytweets update 6

shows twitter user information

Another feature of groovytweets just went live in version v38. If you move your mouse over the twitter user icon of a twitter message, you will now see a popup with some key user information like follower/friends count, location, web and bio. You can also start following that user by clicking on the large green follow link, which takes you to the twitter follow page to follow the user.

I hope you’ll like this feature. I know about certain little issues, e.g. if the user has not filled out his profile you might see a null here and there. I will clean this up the next days and only present the information that is really available of course.

I am also watching the results of the latest grailspodcast poll: What features would you like to see implemented in groovyblogs.org and groovytweets.org. One feature that will be in shortly will be the timestamps for tweets. One of the initial ideas and another reply was to create a Griffon Desktop App that pulls the tweets. I could think if a nice Growl integration, too… but let me tell you that I really first have to catch up with Griffon. I think I see my personal Griffon Pet Project coming :-)

groovytweets update 5

It’s again getting really late (early) so I am trying to keep this one short. Just today, two new cool features were added to groovytweets:

• retweet from within groovytweets. You will have noticed the funky green retweet buttons below the twitter user screen names. Clicking these buttons will bring you directly to a twitter update status page, if you are already logged into twitter. Otherwise, you first have to sign in and are then taken to the update status page. The status is prefilled with the retweet message. There is currently no check if the actual message you are trying to retweet is retweetable, e.g. if there is enough space left to make it a retweet. If a message is too long and does not end with an URL (many do), you may now shorten the message and append … to the shortened message. Groovytweets can still detect this retweet and assign a higher relevancy to the original in this case.
• new user scanning now includes our followers. We now scan a random follower from time to time and check how many groovy tweets he has produced over the last 200 tweets. If we find 2 tweets, we start following that user.  To make this feature work, I also had to update the data we save from the social graph, namely the followers are now also memcached and updated each hour.

That’s it for today – have a good one.

groovytweets update 4

I quickly wanted to shout out the latest features of groovytweets that were implemented that last couple of days:

• RSS/ATOM feeds via Google’s Feedburner (I just realize I am using 100% Google services: Hosting, Feed Hosting, Ads…). There are two feeds available: a feed with all the latest tweets and one only with the important tweets. Important tweets are tweets that have been at least retweetet once (within the community). Feedburner also offers you subscriptions via Email based on those feeds. These feeds are refreshed every 15 minutes.
• Retweeting of important messages. Once a message has reached the first relevancy level, the twitter user ‘groovytweets‘ is now retweeting this status. I had several iterations on this one, as it was first not quite clear what measures it takes not to disturb my own retweet counting, etc., but finally it seems to work. If you follow groovytweets on twitter, this will allow you so identify ‘trending tweets’ quickly. On the other hand the email/RSS feeds allow you to catch up once or twice a day.
• Not exactly a feature, but groovytweets now increased the threshold to follow new people. There have to be at least 3 mentions in the public timeline of another current groovytweets friend to become a new friend. At the same time, we still accept friend suggestions (send me a regular message with <suggest @username>).
• a couple new retweet formats were added.
• minor changes: we have a favicon, important RSS feed is linked in HTML head, etc

Thank you all for clicking the Google Ads by the way. We got a nice click-through rate, which also made me some Euros so far. Believe me, this money will flow back into the service. We just reached about 40% of the compute allowance for one day. Especially the RSS feeds (hence memcaching the data) will eat up a lot more.

I am also thinking about giving groovytweets a proper open-source license. It is just not something I am particularly good at, so I will look into this topic soon. If there are some good tutorials/guidelines out there, please let me know. I also believe that the more abstract form of groovytweets really has some business potential, so I want to choose a license wisely.