What is RTweeter?

As some may know I been working on this site recently over the last week and also have fielded a few email question and answer sessions. So I’m posting an email that was originally sent to Dave Simms @davy_sims

What is Rtweeter?

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter – it more than just a buzz word – it really is more important than Google. There is a big difference in waiting for news to appear in Google after its been broken via press wire sites or actually experiencing it. Think of Twitter as that CNN bar and the bottom of the screen ‘breaking news’ following past you an into your subconscious wither you observe it or not.

Rtweeter was originally designed to help extract the information pertinent to user from potentially 1000’s of sources. However as it has been developed it has also became apparent that being ‘part of the news’ is equally important.

Rtweeter could be deemed in one way as a ‘Google Analytics’ for Social Networks. We provide [I] a toolset of metric tools to measure the value in the information they distribute. The value in knowing who, when and where you articles are being read is important to the individual and companies alike.

The website only went live on the 2nd July to promote allow user to share web address, post maps for events and send tweets that exceed the 140 chars and was more publically launched on the  17th. Tweeting or ‘micro blogging’ are much very convenient as opposed to reading a blog. And when we write some we want to know how many people view our article and gave use feedback. With Rtweeter we provide a number of ways to give the user these valuable metrics :: How many people viewed this link I posted, where has the link been reused, where do my reader some from and who that are. These services are really at core of Rtweeter.

The current RTweeter.com is just an example of what you can do and what information you can extract. GeoLocation services, as in Rtweeter Maps are also valuable, the site already works with the iPhone and other mobile providers to extract GPS or Cell tower information or reverse back an IP address to find out where you are at that moment. As more and more users start considering their Phone as a viable Pocket PC to surf and share information then Twitter is the ideal platform as it has routes as being an SMS service. Indeed I look forward to O2 returning free SMS service for Twitter users later this year.

In addition to these we have a desktop client that allows the user to better organise the information they receive via Twitter. There seems to be a threshold in the number  of users you follow [about 300] before it becomes impossible to manage and you start to miss the more important information.  So with this Rtweeter was originally created to address some simple and yet obvious missing from Twitter. [desktop came first]

High on the list was ‘Groups’ or at least the ability to organise the information supplied to you in a more meaningful way. It was apparent back then there was one or two desktop applications like ‘Tweetdeck’ that did this but, as a programmer’ I was not happy with the result from a technical perspective. Indeed these client seemed to consume a lot of memory on your computer to do what I viewed a very simple task.

Additionally, there was another problem with Twitter, and one category I fell into :: We sometimes tweet ‘too much’. This can be a turn off for your followers if they only are watching say 50 people and you are posting all the great and wonderful articles you have just been reading to share with the twitterverse, but in fact to the follower are of no use. Then they are seeing multiple posts filling up there twitter stream very quickly. Also even if they all your followers where ‘actually’ interested in every article you mentioned having 10 tweets with your article links posted within a 5 minute period would definitely result in missed opportunities to promote whatever it was you where trying to communicate. So scheduling out you messages over a period of time became another high priority, wither it is too reduce the noise generated by back to back article tweets or to specifically target a time that you wish to sent out your message.

Users of the desktop application have told me that they use in ways I would never have imagined. With regards to the scheduled message service : one person told me they used it as their bosses also used twitter, so while they were supposed to be working at home they had scheduled in messages such as ‘busy working on report for tomorrow’ and other similar tweets spread out over the morning when in fact they had been outside working on repairing a patio. I was also contacted by an angry girl friend that said it was ‘disgraceful that provided a tool’ that allow her partner to tweet ‘at home’ ‘walking the dog’ or whatever it was at time. This was never the intended use.

Engaging with the user base brings forward ideas on how to use your services that you would never think of. Twitter users are really passionate about what they believe or expect to see with twitter. I take the time to personal answer any question that users have and will even talk the time to talk directly on Skype. After which, say 20 mins, I have useful feedback on the services that I am developing and can immediately action upon. In addition, the user will often blog and ‘tweets’ your graces ‘at last, a developer that care about users’ and plug your website and encourage other users to try it out. I do this because it is important to get you product right and I believe that companies in general need to be aware of what users are saying about their products. Get it right now with the customer and you have one person who will sing you graces, get it wrong and well… you get the idea.

What is the idea behind it?

What we are providing is a set of tools that can get you started creating your own services. What is ‘key’ for any of these services are what are called Application Programmable Interfaces (API’s) these are just simple libraries that allow anyone to re-use your services as they see fit. Whilst we are not directly developing an iPhone Application : We fully support anyone to develop and build up to our services from within their application or website. We have done the hard work to make it easier for others. What we have created allow us to quickly create new sites and services.

One example we are developing as a showcase is GoingTweet a website that takes our Location based services, tweet longer and stats service to allow users to sell and find items for sale within their area. User can create a good detailed description of each item, add a few pictures and then tweet this once or even share this on any social network. Then just like on the Rtweeter website they can view how much interest people have in each item within seconds of their post. This helps them make crucial decisions very quickly : not getting enough views’ then they might lower the price and re-tweet. Buyers can be members of their social network or just find them via the site itself. In addition you can go to the website and it immediately know where you are and summarise items for sale in your area, the buyer can refine this as they like by item, category or other. Again this is just a showcase and we are not encouraging people to list the items of their house, we encourage user to list items in approximation to where they are eg. Belfast. A user for example in Lisburn or Newry has the option to see local listing or say ‘items’ in their immediate area – however if you ask to show items with 50 miles (or km) then you will see the more listings appear.

Again this is just an example and showcase of what can be done based on the works we have created. The actually bulk of creating GoingTweet was created within 2 days based on the pre-done works of RTweeter. Now that we have this service we can quickly revise this to provide other services, for example a ‘what’s happening’ or ‘event listing’ site using exactly the same principles.

The idea behind Rtweeter.com, as it is now, is to provide a Swiss army knife, of sorts, services for Twitter users and developers. We are not limiting ourselves to one network, it is being used on Facebook, Digg and a variety of Social Network platforms as well as blogs and emails. Emails to me are a dying trade : it is interesting when I have read article or have spoken to teenagers who don’t see the point in email when they can easily share their information from on pivotal point like Bebo or Facebook. This makes sense why dig or troll though you entire list of friends in your mobile or email address contacts to get people attention :: Post once is suffice. With many of the social network’s including Facebook providing free or sponsored SMS alerts to you groups – it’s pretty much job done.

Rtweeter can provide the tools, all you need is an idea.

Why are you doing it?

Rtweeter, as mentioned, started off as a way by which I could improve and manage the information on Twitter. The services I created where to help me manage the vast array of information that was available and put it into an more meaning content. What Ev Williams [Ceo Twitter] has created is a phenomena in our current age, whilst twitter has been around for a while I still think it in infancy with the explosion only being the last 6 months.

Once we saw CNN using twitter to take comments from viewers prior to the US Presidential Election then you had to know twitter was going big. People knew it was only a matter of time until a big celebrity, the ‘Brittany’ effect [in reference to Brittany Spears] that ‘John C. Dovak’ [http://www.crankygeeks.com/] a regular on many tech shows and podcasts predicted very early on last year, and he was right. And a year later the top 5 users [according to twitterholic.com] are as ordered : Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres, Britney Spears, CNN and Oprah each with approximately 2 million users.

Prior to January this was lead by a contingent of British celebs with a big lead by Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) [then 350k now 660k followers] who encourage people like the then suspend Jonathan Ross [@wossy] and other to get into ‘tweeting’. People in the states who had never watched UK television where talking about Jonathan Ross due to @stephenfry talking about him – this showed the truly wonderful potential of twitter. Stephen fry also credited twitter with ‘breaking him into the states’ [citation needed].

It really come down to the fact that I developed the tools use myself at the start and it was quite easy as a programmer to open these services, expand on them and offer these services to others. Rtweeter and it related tools and services are used on more than 200+ site [227 at last count] to help track, measure and share link across a multitude of social networks :: that pretty good going for a service that didn’t exist two weeks ago.

There are a whole range of services developing around twitter, so as a developer, what’s the  appeal of working with Twitter as a development tool?

As a developer it the ease and simplicity of the API that Twitter provides. It’s open and readably accessible for any developer on any platform to use. It, in my opinion, set the standard by which a lot of social networks are trying to met – Facebook as an example have been heavily influence by Twitter by re-interfacing [designing] the users default home page to resemble the twitter style flow. It also open up its own ‘messaging’ API as a direct result of the sheer amount of applications and websites that where taking advantage of twitter. They even approached twitter with a $500m offer earlier this year and where rejected after which they really started to push the facebook messaging APIand SMS service.

For me, it just makes sense. Ease of use and re-use. I come from a background in Business Systems Integration and Search development and both these aspects are brought to play when looking at and wanting to develop for Twitter. Twitter is very affective at creating content that is completely fresh and available in real time. The recent Indonesian bombing where first broke on twitter by users tweeting from mobile phones. [ looked up a reference for this http://www.loosewireblog.com/2009/07/jakarta-bombings-and-twitter-timeline-and-thoughts.html should be other examples]. So we see breaking news as it happens before it gets to the AP and reported within traditional media.

This is an extreme case of breaking ‘very sad and tragic’ news but important none the less as how information travels out so fast.

Twitter also has a unique position with Google. Google tends to really like Twitter users and offers unique page rankings based on frequency of updates and the number of followers. I know that from my own experience that web site can be indexed on Google within hours of tweeting them. Now think of the days before twitter and you wanted to launch a website it could take weeks or even months before you could get listed on Google and longer to build up a following of visitors. Get your product right on Twitter and once you tweet it you immediate alert  thousands of people who follow you, who in turn Re-Tweet this to the people who follow them in turn. Twitter is very viral in this way. So what we have done is not only got users by potential 100’s of links back to you site which Google recognises as a good sign that you have something worth indexing.

So the rewards as a developer within the web industry seem to be obvious to me.

And as far as you want to say, what other tools you are thinking about?

Well I mentioned ‘GoingTweet’ as one service. I also working on a completely new desktop client build on Silverlight 3 [a new browser technology from Microsoft]. This desktop version allow me to expand on the current desktop that was built using Flex [a Flash based technology] and overcome some of the technical limitations of the latter platform. Silverlight itself also for more parallel development of the central Rtweeter code and API and they literally share the same code at heart. The desktop version will allow for more ‘behind the scenes’ services for users. That all we can say at this point, although groups and scheduling will again be one of the at heart services.

Rtweeter.com itself is getting a few more services ‘live groups’ is one and I’m currently in talks with a number of potential partners to provide file sharing from the platform. We will have to partner on this as bandwidth and storage can get quite expensive in relative terms to running a our sites.

We already have the ability to share all types of file from images, pdf’s word documents etc and see this as a value service to user wanting to share a holiday picture during their holiday, a company wanting to share a press release or an engineer wanting to send a report back from location.

In the engineering example we just employ the GPS system as demoed on rtweeter.com [ http://rtweeter.com/TweetMaps] which is already being used. This same service to a holidaymaker, as mentioned earlier allows them to say ‘I am here, it nice’ and here’s the picture. Returning to GoingCheap, we can already provide information over any Geographical area so we see this as a viable and potentially commercial service, for twitter and other social network but possibly as a standalone product when you think of engineering and reporting.

Also we will be expanding on our Schedule a Message service which will bring even more value as a service. It fair to expect that some tools will be commercial while others are free. Indeed the best route to market is free : I think alot of internet developers and user are all familiar with the whole ‘Beta’ gambit now played out by so many company. This allows for the 1000’s of hours of user testing often need to launch new services. I want users to have the best experience they can but there are some services that would simply cost too much in terms of resources and investment that there would be no other way to fund. The upside is that this commercial element can be driven back to the free everyday users, so user wake up one morning and discover the Rweeter.com or one of its associated sites or applications now has picture sharing service with maybe a little endorsement contained on their view page to the provider.

There are a lot more services that I want to produce but you have to stay focused on achieving and developing services, just talking about ‘what might or could be done’ doesn’t write the code or deliver results. New services have to go though the whole building and testing and possibly rebuilding prior to releasing them into the wild.

So that’s it hope this helps.

If you need any information just get in touch.