32Hours

How did I forget to post about this?  I’m a bit of a flaky geek sometimes.  BeTwittered features now include tabs for viewing replies, your favorites, and direct messages to you.  Admittedly, the tabs are rudimentary right now, but they work.  Sometimes I chose to release features and do the “prettying up” incrementally.  I favor getting features out over application beauty.  There are still a couple of possible additions coming sometime soon…

It’s been a long time coming, and I’ve gotten plenty of email requesting the new features that have finally made their way into BeTwittered.  Most notable are the reply and direct message functions.  The interface also got a bit of an upgrade with nice icons/buttons, and now by clicking the “Show More” button on a tweet, you can get extended info about the sender and the tweet.  The “show more” button, by the way, is how you also get to the reply and direct message buttons.

Next on my plate?  I’m looking to add a “replies” tab so you can see who has sent you a reply.  Also, I will be adding a “back” button so you can page through your tweet history.  This has to wait until Twitter turns this feature back on.  Right now, it’s just not available to us.

First off, I want to apologize for the blank gadgets, slow responses, and general bad week.  Sorry! I moved BeTwittered to a faster server just in time for Twitter to start having it’s own bad week of daily outages. I’ve been busy tuning the new server and BeTwittered in my free time hoping to alleviate some of the problems caused by the twitter outages and slowness (blank gadget screens, for example) My apologies for the poor error handling. I’ll be working on that over the next few days. I’ve added a couple new feature requests to my list of “hopefuls” including timezones, resizing, etc. Happy twittering! Robert

Scott (http://twitter.com/nintender) and I are working on the next update of BeTwittered.  A couple of the features we’re working on are allowing multiple account logons, and context menus that will include things like “reply” and “direct message” selections.  Is there anything that you’ve been wishing BeTwittered could do?  Something we could create and help to stop your pain?  We have a couple of our own wishes, but let us know what yours are.  Leave a comment if you think you have the bestest idea ever, or even just little, teency, itty-bitty wish.  We love to hear from you all.

The last change before testing and deployment is now in the works.  It should be done by tomorrow, March 13.  That would mean that Monday, March 14th, BeTwittered would see another update.  It may be the last before some more significant changes.  I have some ideas that I want to incorporate that would mean a short-term freeze on fixes and tweaks so that the focus can go into an upgrade.

This morning, a new version of BeTwittered went live. Because it’s web based the update is automatic, so if you already use BeTwittered, you’ll just get the updates. For most people, the obvious change will be the addition of time-stamps. If you don’t like having them, you can turn them off in the “settings” – FYI – Pictures can be turned off, too. Now, someone (I won’t mention a name, but it rhymes with “Steve”) noted that at some screen resolutions, BeTwittered didn’t “wrap” well, so made it hard to read Tweets without having to scroll around the screen. I checked it out, and it was truly a pain, and ugly. I’ve fixed the text area so it resizes, so BeTwittered should now look a LOT better for anyone that had this issue before. Happy Tweeting.

Last night, some updates went into the released version of BeTwittered.  Two features are added.  The first is that replies and any other “@username” reference is now highlighted, and clickable.  Clicking an @username reference will now take you directly to that persons Twitter home page.  Also, there is now a settings page.  Click on settings, and you’ll get, currently, two options:  You can choose to logout of twitter, and you can choose to turn off user pictures in the timeline.  

Related news: It appears that google may have fixed an issue they were having with their gadget directory.  Since last night, BeTwittered and “Amazon Top 10 Geek/Tech Books” are showing up again.  This means you can use “add stuff” on your Google homepage to get these gadgets again (and a whole lot of others that were also missing) 

I am really happy with my progress with the Google Gadget / Widget I’ve put together for Twitter. Today I decided to rewrite the app, incorporating some of the best pieces. What I did was re-implement the Twitter “friends time-line” in AJAX and modularize as much as I could so that it would be a better user experience. Sorry…in English: I made it work better when new “tweets” show up, and made it easier for me to fix the app, and add features. If have a Google account and you’d like to check it out, click HERE!->Twitter iGoogle Gadget (32hours.com) UPDATE(06Jan08, 6:45am): I’ve fixed a bug for IE users. It now works in IE again. Also, working on a login page bug (please bear with the temporary ugliness!)

I’ve created another Google gadget for the iGoogle homepage.  This one is for Twitter.  Twitter is an interesting service, follow the link and check it out!  I was not satisfied with any of the Twitter gadgets already on google, and there weren’t many.  Of the few that were there, a good number of them did not even work for me, and the others didn’t allow for you to send updates to Twitter.  Twitter iGoogle Gadget is now functional enough that I am using it.  I will be making it look better, and adding features.  My goal is to keep it usable as a gadget, and as a mobile Twitter client (I’m not terribly satisfied with Twitters own mobile version)  No screeshot yet, but you can check it out by clicking the google link below: