Thanks to the organisers @inuda @jonmarkwell @markabaker @stewarttownsend and support of Sun MicroSystems as well as thanks to @YellowPark for live streaming  the event.

We will be presenting "the good, the bad and the ugly" of twitter from our perspective and experience as a third party twitter application developer.  

If you are at the event tonight please do come along and say hello or comment on the twitter backchannel or directly in the comments below. We will be demonstrating the new version Twitblogs that supports Twitter's OAuth and also our implmentation of Facebook Connect, Google Connect etc via RPX. 

Event Schedule:

The full schedule for the evening is as follows:

Live Streaming:

 

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Very soon twitblogs will be adding the ability for you to login (Authentication) with any of the following OpenID user identities. (see image below)

When this is combined with twitters OAuth (Authorisation), which we have running on our demo site, you'll be able to login into twitter seamlessly and securely.

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Today we are excited to release a number of new features into build 0.25 which we hope continues to make twitblogs more useful for you.  

1.Emoticons

With only 140 characters per tweet, the idiom "a picture paints a thousand words" has never seemed more apt.  As a result we have included the option to add emoticons to any of your tweets in order to express them more succinctly.

2. Hashtags

We like using hashtags and then searching for them in twitter, to see what other people are saying about the same topic.


In the future we plan to build and display [in the sidebar] a tag cloud that best reflects your posts and tweets.  

3. Twitblo.gs (white-labelled short URL's)

For a while we have been working closely with @PierreFar, CEO of Cligs, to enable our own branded short URL service powered by Cligs. This is our first step to creating a management dashboard that will enable you to analyse your tweets, url links and social graph from inside of twitblogs.


 

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Twitblogs is still an alpha project right now. We are working hard to add new features whilst debugging and optimising the code.  That said, I am really pleased to say that this new version is a massive step forward for twitblogs, both in terms of speed and functionality.

The key new features in this build include: (see the numbers in the image below)

1. Threaded Conversations:
I love the real-time nature and nosie of twitter. I liken it to being at a bar or dinner party with many of my friends chatting in different groups about different subjects and as I flit between the groups I dip in and out of various conversations.

Using twitter is sometimes very similar. Sometimes its hard to grasp the conversation between friends given that one tweet may appear several minutes after the original tweet. Now with twitblogs we have managed to thread various conversations together enabling you to see how the whole conversation nested together.

Hint: This feature is being enhanced enabling you to 'filter' conversations or 'track' keywords. 

2. Comments:
Of course in any conversation it's nice to sometimes add your own point of view by responding to friends tweets.  One way is to simple enter a new tweet with an @ or DM to the person concerned but another new way is to now click on the comment icon inside of each tweet and respond directly to the conversation.

Hint: This feature is being enhanced enabling you to further respond directly to 'sub-comments' within a conversation or to the whole 'group'. 

3. Presence:
Today presence enables users to simply turn-off/on the auto-refresh function in order to catch up on older tweets.

Hint: This feature is being enhanced to work with 'XMPP' and location services such as Yahoo! FireEagle and Google Latitude.

4. Favourite Tweetback:
Favourites in twitter is a very underutilised function. Often when I like a tweet, I favourite it but I would also like to let original tweet owner know. Thus with favourite tweetbacks, we send a simple reply tweet to the originator letting them know their tweet has just been favourited by you.

Hint: This feature is being enhanced to enable your favourite tweets to be categorised, sorted and/or searched. 

5. Auto-Refresh:
The auto-refresh feature in twtiblogs enables me to get new tweets pretty much as they happen.

Hint: This feature is being enhanced to improve the user interface experience with better visual notifications similar to Growl so that you can work in another browser tab or application and still see your new messages.

6. Twitter Oauth:
Thirdparty developers like twitblogs are sometimes criticised for asking users to enter their twittername and password even though we do not store that information.  The only reason we ask is to associate your tweets to the twitter API.

The good news is very soon twitter will be bringing out a new function called OAuth which enables users to login on a trusted twitter.com site with their username and password.  Then twitter sends back to trusted third party developers a secure token which we use to pull your tweets into twitblogs.

This feature has been completed on our test site and we have shared the site login credentials with the twitter development community. Right now we are awaiting the approval from twitter to push this feature to our live build which we are told we can do in a few weeks time.

Hint: We are currently working with several other third party developers to include their services in the twitblogs dashboard and enable acces to these services via OAuth.  

7. Speed:
Last but not least this new build is 10 times faster to load given the code enhancements we have made. We plan to make twitblogs load even faster when we move to a new dedicated server in the coming weeks whilst also moving more of the data to the edge by utilisng the more of the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN). i.e nearer to a users location.

Finally as ever we hope you like this new version of twitblogs. We appreciate all your feedback and feature requests. Please continue to follow us @twitblogs for more updates and tell your friends about us.

Thanks in advance

Twitblogs Team

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We began developing twitblogs eight weeks ago and each week we have launched a new version.  Today we are very excited to have included an auto-refresh feature into our twitter tab.  This means twitblogs will now poll twitter for your new tweets and automatically refresh your twitterstream.

At any time if you wish to temporarily pause this feature you can simply change your Presence status to offline and twitblogs will continue to cache your tweets in the background until you are ready to go back online.

Adding this new feature takes us one step closer to our goal of having a real-time twitter client with a much smaller memory and cpu footprint, one that replaces the need to poll twitter periodical. In fact a new real-time version of twitblogs is already in our planning and we expect to roll this out in the coming weeks.

Another key feature of v0.23 is the threading of comments within our blog client.  This means as a reader you can either respond to the blog author's post with a comment or you can directly respond to another persons comments. Either way we will link and visually nest that series of comments. Again we expect to extend this new feature into our twitter and search tabs in the coming weeks.

Besides these two new features we have also added support for twitter's archives, so you can now see all your own tweets including those you may have sent via a direct message.

As ever we are keen to hear your feedback and thoughts on twitblogs and what you might like us to include in future versions. We hope you enjoy this new version.

Thanks in advance

The Twitblogs Team.

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Our plan from day one has been to update twitblogs on a weekly basis.  The development team has worked really hard to ensure we keep to this roadmap. Today they have released v0.22.1 which has fixed a number of bugs that users have told us about on our feedback channel.

The next major build - v0.23 is planned next week with a host of key enhancements for our blog posting, twitter update and search features.

If you have ideas that you would like us to implement next please let us know  or if you sadly find bugs in this new build we would love to know so they can be addressed asap.

Thanks in advance

Twitblogs Team

 

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