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TwitBin.Blog

News and developments from twitbin.com

A year of tweetsMay 13 2008

So it was a year and a week ago that we launched Twitbin to the world. We’ve gone through a number of small iterations to the service (not as many major ones as I would have liked), and listened to a LOT of feedback along the way. I’d like to thank all of you for using the site/service and giving us feedback to help improve them.

So where are we now?
Well we’ve been used by 30,000+ twitter users over a grand total of 71 Million minutes of use. We have users in 40+ countries spanning the globe (most in the US, canada, and brazil) who have collectively posted hundreds of thousands of tweets.

So where are we going?
Well we’ve been planning twitbin v2.0 for a while, and we know there is a lot more competition in the twitter client space now than there was when we launched. So how do we make it better than ever? How can we make this the best tool for using twitter period.

One of the things we’ve been talking about a lot lately has been how to improve the twitter and twitbin experiences through twitbin.com. We’re working on some ways to enhance the functionality of our application and hopefully build a closely knit community here as well. Ultimately though, we want to see what you all think would make the best possible twitter client (it doesn’t even have to be a twitter-only, but lets not get crazy, we do this for fun).

Here is the short list of things we’re planning on doing:

• Speeding up the system (re

Firefox 3.0b4 support.March 26 2008

So we decided to publicly release our latest plugin which offers support for the latest firefox beta release. There are a number of bugs in it, and we highly recommend you sending them to us, either via this post or via twitter (@twitbin).

So you can grab the xpi directly from the homepage whenever you feel like it.

Cheers,
Brian

Firefox 3 support update & SXSW newsMarch 4 2008

Update:The plugin has been released into the wild on the homepage. Just click on the link to install. works with up to 3.0b4. several bugs are still in need of working out.

So lots of you have been asking for FF3 support. Well we’ve been rewriting our extension to work with 3.0b3, which is kinda buggy at the moment, but we would still like to get some of you to help us test it.

So if you’d like to test it, please post a comment here and include your twitter username so we can send you the super secret link to the XPI.

Known bugs: if twitbin is open when your window opens it won’t load no matter how many times you reopen it. You have to close it, then reopen the firefox window and then reopen twitbin. This should be fixed when the next beta comes out.

Also in preparation for SXSW next week, Twitter is lowering the hourly API requests you can each make from 70 to 50. So if you get the annoying “you’ve exceeded twitter’s hourly request limit” then you know why. We suggest setting your reset to 5 minutes or 10 minutes to avoid this. Also if you are in texas for SXSW next week, please d msg us (twitbin) so we can meet you all!

Another thing, if you’re an IE7 user, and want to test our IE7 plugin, let us know in the comments by saying which one you’d like to try out. (It is also buggy, but since we’re mac users we couldn’t do much to fix it).

Community feedback & November updateNovember 23 2007

So I figure I won’t bore you all with the goings on on twitbin this month, things have been rather quiet on this front. We’ve been busy working on stuff for clients, and our own projects.

So I think I’d like to open this up to discussion. We’ve got several ideas we’re kicking around, and we want to see what you like best. I’d like to see what you all would like to see from twitbin. Here are some of our ideas:

• multiple skins/themes
• desktop version (using adobe air)
• internet explorer 7 support (note this is actually built, but we have no clue how to fix a major bug we found, so if you’d like to help us, please shoot me an email brian[at]twitbin.com
• a twit this tool to let you share whatever you’re looking at
• more advanced twitter tools (these would require you to manage the options on twitbin.com)
• ad-free version (we’re thinking $20/year?)

So what do you all think?

For those of you curious, we did just pass 19,000 users and 35 Million minutes of use since may.

About the maximum requests issueOctober 26 2007

Some of you may have noticed that we’ve put in a new alert to notify you when you’ve exceeded the maximum requests threshold given to us by Twitter. This means we are allowed to make 70 api calls per hour, per user. So there are a couple ways you can solve this issue, easiest is to reduce your refresh frequency to 10 minutes instead of 3 (we’ll add a 5 minute and 7 minute intervals later today), the other way to solve it is to just leave twitbin open, as it reduces the calls to twitter (we close the session each time you close/open the window).

We’re going to work on reducing the number of requests, so you are less likely to run over the limit, but please bare with us for the time being.