TweetTabs, A Story

For everyone who follows me on twitter or knows me personally would know that yesterday I launched something that i have been working on for a very long time. TweetTabs is a way of tracking real-time twitter trends and searches, and has been my little project since i first started on it back in Easter. The idea came from the lack on online real-time ways to interface with twitter, the premise is simple, i wanted an easy way to search for things in twitter which constantly updated, so TweetTabs was born.

The initial application was written in about 2 hours entirely in JavaScript, it later went through a number of huge revisions especially over the Easter weekend. It gained quite a lot of features, and then lost them. I wrote an entire OAuth module in JavaScript, then realised that you can’t authenticate headers. The project was basically done apart from one of the most complicated features. Then my life changed, I broke up with my long term girlfriend, of 5 years, and had to move back home with my parents. Even though this didn’t dent my enthusiasm for the project it definitely affected the timescales.

How it works

TweetTabs is a very simple idea, but it takes a very long time to solve the problems it presents. The entire application is written in JavaScript, this gets around the notion of having a API limit for your twitter searches, you are now only limited by your I.P. address, which has a much higher (not declared) limit. For every tab TweetTab hits twitter to fetch the data, this is controlled by our adaptive pollrate. Put simply this means that each tab can work out the optimum time to fetch more data from twitter. We try and limit the number of times TweetTabs hits twitter in the hour, mostly so that you don’t reach your API limit (it is possible, and I did it a lot in testing), and we don’t overload twitter.

TweetTabs Screencast from Daniel Saxil-Nielsen on Vimeo.

Coverage

So now TweetTabs has been launched and has had loads of positive feedback and has been covered on loads of huge sites:

• http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/16/tweettabs-is-an-awesome-way-to-search-twitter/
• http://mashable.com/2009/06/16/tweettabs/

Dedications

I don’t know whether this is normally done for releasing products, but I feel it is appropriate, I would like to mention everyone who helped with the process along the way. Starting firstly with @nickhalstead, who supported me the whole way (and sorry it took so long). @nicktelford who was there to bounce ideas of and to find lots of bugs just before we were about the launch. @alexforrow for writing a really good deployment script, which merges all the files and obfuscates them. All the great people that tested it along the way: @chris_alexander, @craigyd, @amykate and @girlygeekdom (who is probably the one who answers @tweettabs questions online).

TweetTabs is built using Prototype and the JavaScript framework, and is powered by TweetMeme, and Twitter.