Tweetree Blog

We’ve been loving the response to Tweetree that we see on Twitter and Uservoice.  One of the most common types of feedback has been people asking for support for common Twitter tasks that are currently missing from Tweetree, or are not as simple as they could be.

Specifically:

1. Being able to view users’ friends and followers lists, and the ability to follow and unfollow.
2. A “retweet” button that saves you the time from having to manually copy and paste a tweet and add the “RT @username” text.
3. Not having to log back into Tweetree whenever you start a new browser session.  This is commonly done as an optional “remember me” checkbox that you can check when you login.

Good news: all of the above features (and more) have been added on Tweetree.com!  We’ve also added some visual improvements throughout the site.  We hope you like these changes, and encourage everyone to let us know your thoughts in the comments, Uservoice, Twitter, or FriendFeed.

If you’re into stocks, then you’re going to love this: we just put out an update to Tweetree that will automatically link to stock tickers via StockTwits!  If you aren’t already familiar with StockTwits, then here’s how it works: if someone tags a stock ticker with a dollar-sign before it (like $AAPL or $GOOG), then it’s turned into a link to the corresponding StockTwits page for that stock.  Tweetree now recognizes these tags too and embeds a link to that StockTwits page.

Check out this example of a recent tweet showing it off.  Of course, this is just scratching the surface of what can be done with Tweetree:

• Here’s a chart and graph embedded with a tweet
• Check out an embedded YouTube video
• And another impressive chart with annotations

So give it a shot, and let us know what you think!

In light of the recent security concerns arising around Twitter and the need for third-party apps to use your Twitter credentials to interact with your account, we thought it might be a good time to discuss our stance on the issue and hopefully clear up any concerns you may have in using Tweetree as your Twitter client.

Why we need your Twitter password
Tweetree uses the Twitter API, a programming interface for communicating with the Twitter service.  Twitter makes this API available to third-party developers like Tweetree.  For many Twitter API uses (such as retrieving tweets in your Twitter stream), the Twitter API requires that you supply your username and password.   This is a requirement of the Twitter API, and there is no alternative at the moment.

Only some features require you to login
You only need to login if you want to view your own personal stream or post to Twitter. You can view anybody’s public stream and use the search feature without logging in, similar to the Twitter.com pages.

Your account details are stored securely, and only for the duration of your visit
While you’re using Tweetree, we hold on to your login and password so you don’t need to keep supplying it whenever we communicate with the Twitter API.  Since Tweetree does a number of Twitter API requests in quick succession (such as retrieving the context of tweets), it would be impractical to keep asking for your password (and ultimately no more secure). Your username and password is stored in a temporary database that is removed whenever you close your browser (or delete your cookie).

We will never sell or otherwise share your information with anyone
Our Privacy Policy goes into further details on this, but the bottom line is that we are in this for the long run, your trust is important to us, and we won’t sell/rent/divulge your password or other confidential information.

We are an established company with a reputation to uphold
Draconis Software, LLC has been in business for over three years providing web development and consulting services to many clients. We have a physical mailing address and a telephone number.  We’re also not a faceless company: the three people who worked on Tweetree for Draconis is @cwalcott, @rtwomey, and @jfredson.

We will use a more secure method of authentication as soon as Twitter makes it available
We are as anxious as anyone for Twitter to implement a more secure method of authentication (such as OAuth) that doesn’t require you to give out your account password to third-party apps. Will will implement this as soon as Twitter makes it available, which will no longer require you to supply your password.

Change your password frequently
As long as Twitter is requiring third-party apps to use your account credentials, you should get in the habit of changing your password often, especially if you are trying out new third-party apps that don’t have a reliable track-record that you can trust.

If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to send us a message @tweetree or info@tweetree.com.

Two new things to share about Tweetree:

1. We’ve added item-level permalinks.  What this means is that you can link directly to a specific post, such as this one or this one.  To find the permalink, you just have to click on the time next to the user’s name.  It’ll also turn blue when you mouse over a post.
2. There’s now a FriendFeed account for Tweetree: http://friendfeed.com/tweetree.  It’s pulling in posts from this blog as well as our Twitter account, and we’ll be watching any conversation that happens too.

One of the things that we’re really excited about with Tweetree is being able to show additional information for links beyond just their title and URL.  Up until now, we’ve done this by choosing popular sites that people link to, such as Twitpic, YouTube, or FriendFeed, and adding support for their pages.

But this doesn’t have to be one-way.  Dave Winer has started discussing a mechanism for web pages to include information on what a thumbnail for the page should be.  This is in the form of a simple line you can add to any page on your site.  For example, if you link to any page on Flickrfan, such as this one on Tweetree you’ll see a thumbnail of the image embedded below the message.

We’re currently supporting this for any site that adds a tag like this one to the head of their pages:

<thumbs:thumb url=”http://static.flickrfan.org/afp/thumbnails/2008/12/28/trpar2329681.jpg” type=”image/jpeg” width=”150″ height=”87″ />

Too keep it XHTML, you can add this namespace:

xmlns:thumbs=”http://scripting.com/thumbSpace”

Over time, I hope that we’ll be able to support other types of media like video, audio, or text (such as a summary or intro to blog posts).

So what is Tweetree in one sentence?

It’s a web-based Twitter client that gives context to replies, and follows links to show embedded content like pictures and videos.

What does this look like in practice?  Here’s a few tweets from Dave Winer on twitter.com:

Here’s what those tweets look like on Tweetree:

There are two main things going on here:

1. When Tweetree sees a reply (typically a twitter message that starts with “@username”), it sees which message this was in reply to, and shows that “tweet” as well.  This gives a lot more context to all those replies, so you don’t feel like you’re just seeing one half of a two-way conversation.  In the case where a reply is in reply to another reply, you can hover over the tweet and click “full conversation” to follow up the tree even more.
2. All links that appear in tweets are analyzed.  More and more often I find people posting links in their messages.  A brief test that I ran over a 24 hour period found that close to 25% of the tweets on the public timeline contained links of some kind.  Most of the time, links are shortened with services like tinyurl.com and bit.ly, to keep the messages within the 140 character limit.  This means that you usually have to click the links to see where they go, and what kind of content they contain.

Minimally, Tweetree will show the title and root URL of all links it finds.  In many cases though, we’re able to embed additional content for things like images and videos.  Currently, the services we support include Twitpic, YouTube, Flickr, FriendFeed, Qik, Seesmic, Blip.fm and more.  We plan to support even more as time goes on.

This all started from a post written by Dave Winer called “The space between Twitter and FriendFeed”.  While Twitter provides a great base for microblogging, it lacks the visual richness that a site like FriendFeed provides.  We hope Tweetree will help fill this “space between” these two sites.

You can see anyone’s Twitter stream on Tweetree by visiting tweetree.com/<username>.  For example, my page is http://tweetree.com/cwalcott.  You can also do searches.  A fun one to periodically refresh is for twitpic: http://tweetree.com/search?q=twitpic.  If you choose to login to Tweetree with your Twitter account, you can see your friends stream as you would on twitter.com, and post through Tweetree. (Incidentially, we’re planning on supporting OAuth for Twitter as soon as it’s released.)

To follow new features as they come out, you can subscribe to this blog, and also follow us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/tweetree).  We’d also love to hear everyone’s ideas, so we’ve setup a Uservoice page at http://tweetree.uservoice.com.

About us: We’re a Boston-area consulting firm called Draconis Software, focusing on Rails, Java and iPhone development. You can learn more about us at http://dracoware.com.