Tweetree Blog

Recently Twitter released a new login option for third-party apps called OAuth which enables users to login to third-party Twitter apps without providing their account passwords. At the moment it is still in public beta while Twitter tests it out and finalizes it for release.

You can read more about Twitter OAuth here: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/OAuth-FAQ

We have been watching the OAuth developments closely and have so far been waiting for more stability in the platform before switching over completely to avoid any unnecessary downtime when there are interruptions in the service.

Due to popular demand though we have decided to roll out OAuth login on Tweetree today as an option for user’s who prefer it over the standard username/password login. We will continue to support the option to login with your username and password until either OAuth comes out of beta and/or Twitter removes the standard authentication methods from their API.

Saved Searches

In this update we have also implemented support for Saved Searches. You should now see your saved searches in the sidebar and you can add and remove searches from any search results page. Your saved searches on Tweetree are synced with your Twitter account so any changes you make to your saved searches on Tweetree will show up on Twitter.com as well.

As always, we rely on user feedback to make Tweetree the best possible web Twitter experience, so please let us know what you think about these changes. You can reach us @tweetree on Twitter or via email at info@tweetree.com.

Today’s new feature update also brought another component we’ve been hard at work on for the last several weeks. We’ve considered a number of different ways to generate some income from Tweetree, and we’re going to be experimenting with one that we think is most promising to our users. When you’re logged in you may see an advertisement on your home stream. If you like the product that’s advertised and decide to purchase it, you’ll be directly supporting Tweetree.

There are quite a few different kinds of links in our ad system: some are for individual products, while others are for deals, coupons, or promotions. The products being advertised are all hand-picked, and are geared toward our users’ interests.

This new advertising system is an experiment we’re trying out. We’re hoping to find a system that is both useful to our users and brings in some revenue to support Tweetree. To do that, we’re relying on your feedback. Let us know what you think, both good and bad.

As always, thanks for supporting Tweetree!

Tweetree is now sporting embedded content for blog posts! With this latest step, using Tweetree turns your twitter stream into a feedreader.

A huge number of links are shared via Twitter, but most are nothing but a shortened URL. When Tweetree launched, we embedded a lot of media, like images (Flickr, Twitpic, yFrog) and movies (YouTube, Seesmic, Qik). We’ve just put the finishing touches on a new feature that embeds all links that have corresponding RSS feeds.

Check out the 45 second video to see what Tweetree is all about:

We’re very excited about this new addition to Tweetree as it bridges the gap between “blogging” and “microblogging”, and adds an interesting new dimension to reading blogs.

Let us know what you think, and be sure to tell us if this makes a difference in how you read blogs.

We implemented some performance updates last night that increase the efficiency of how Tweetree accesses the Twitter API and gets the data to the users. You shouldn’t notice any difference in the site except that pages are hopefully loading a little bit faster than before. The main thing is that Tweetree will now scale much more efficiently as our dedicated visitors keep increasing and Tweetree continues to take off in the twitterverse.

Chart.ly launched today, and Tweetree is now embedding these images in your stream automatically. If you’re a StockTwits user (or just a stocks fan), you’ll definitely want to take advantage of Chart.ly in Tweetree.

You can also track the latest chart.ly postings using the tweetree search for quick chart browsing.

We are always looking for more services to support to make your Tweetree experience even more full, so make sure to let us know on our uservoice page which services you would like to see added.

We’ve implemented a live check for new posts on your home stream, user profile pages and search results. You should now see a message show up at the top of any of these pages whenever there are new tweets to see. You will also see a number in the title of the window that indicates how many new posts are available so that you can still keep an eye on available updates even when you are in a different tab.

As always we are excited to hear what you think about this new feature, so please send us your tweets @tweetree with your thoughts.

We’ve just finished implementation of favorites in Tweetree so now you can star any post that you like and see it listed in your new favorites tab. You can also view any of your friends favorites by clicking the little star next to their name on their profile page.

This wraps up our implementation of the basic functionality features of Twitter.com so you should now be able to do anything on Tweetree that you can do on Twitter.com!

We have lots of exciting new features in the works that we are planning to release over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on the site and this blog for updates. We are keeping a close eye on our Uservoice page so make sure you check that out frequently too and let us know which new features you are most looking forward to.

We’ve been experiencing a steady weekly rise in visitors at Tweetree.com, but we’ve been a bit curious of some strange swings that seemed to be happening fairly consistently in our daily visitor numbers. Upon closer inspection we discovered that the swings were repeated almost exactly the same every week and realized that it was probably a direct reflection of twitter usage patterns over the days of the week.

We broke down the daily averages and built up this nice chart to show you how the twitter week flows:

As you can see, the twitter week seems to pick up on Sunday, rising on Monday, dropping a bit on Tuesday, hitting it’s peak on Wednesday and then steadily dropping off into the weekend. This pattern has repeated itself almost exactly week-by-week since our launch, and we suspect it may be indicative of the larger usage pattern of twitter in general.

It’s interesting to hypothesize how this probably coincides with the daily motivation in the workplace on each day of the week, but we’ll leave that to more seasoned management professionals. What do you think this data reflects?

We’ve fixed the issue with Lala song embeds. Some recent updates at Lala.com broke our old embed, but it should be working again now. We’ve also added support for album and playlist embeds.

Just for reference, the following links should work for embeds (note, the # sign is optional):

http://www.lala.com/#album/432627039263982432 (embeds the album)
http://www.lala.com/#song/432627073623720800 (embeds the song)
http://www.lala.com/#song/432627039263982432/432627073623720800 (Note, that’s albumID/songId, and it will embed the song)
http://www.lala.com/#memberplaylist/60367P18206 (embeds the playlist)

Please let us know how this works for you and what you think of the changes.

We are happy to announce that Tweetree now has full DM support built right in. You should see a DMs tab under your ‘@me’ tab which will take you to a page where you can view your DMs inbox and sent folder and send DMs to any user who follows you without having to prefix your message with “d username”.

We also made a few small design changes around the site, most notably in the tweet streams. You should now see small icons for ‘reply’, ‘retweet’ and other actions on every post in place of the old links in the post header.

We hope you find these updates useful and that they make your daily Tweetree use more fun and effective than ever. As always please let us know what you think either here in the comments or in a tweet @tweetree. And if you like what you see, don’t forget to tell all your friends!