It’s been a while. Again.


Or at least, no more OpenID. As much as we all love OpenID, it was just not necessary for EagleTweet. At the same time, it got a tiny bit cleaner, too.


It has been a while. And EagleTweet has been growing and is spreading around the world:


User locations

In case you wondered: That’s where in the world people are using EagleTweet.


Everything seems to run smoothly right now.


As some of you might have noticed over the weekend, we had some problems updating your location and sending out messages on Twitter.

On thursday Twitter deployed a change on their API that rendered the library I used for EagleTweet useless. After a long weekend they decided that, since at least one PHP library seems to have no problems, it must be a client error and therefore did nothing about it. So I changed the library to the one that is working and – surprisingly enough – it works. The only exception – and that is a known error – are locations/tweets with symbols that are not pure ASCII. You’d think that this wouldn’t be a problem in 2009 anymore, but well… They promised to fix it until later today, so I hope as soon as that is done, everything will work fine again on our side.


At the moment, we have this:

EagleTweet
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Not very pretty and at least I think it’s not too obvious what exactly is happening and why the tweet selector has checkboxes and the location selector radiobuttons and so on. It does, however give the possibility to rather fine-tune how EagleTweet is working. For a while I had mine set up in a way that it sets the location to my current city but only send a tweet when I am in a new state.
Confusingly enough there is already some other place where you set the location you want EagleTweet to know:

Fire Eagle : Authorize Application
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

The FireEagle settings. Now I ask you – is it too confusing to have multiple settings? Should it just be “Tweet/Don’t tweet” and “Set location/Don’t set location” or is the current fine tune system better? Or do you have an even better idea?


The last few days since the usage of EagleTweet suddenly went up, I got a lot of very useful feedback, both on Twitter and on GetSatisfaction. I compiled a quite long list of things I need to fix/change/add to make the EagleTweet experience a better one for everyone who uses it. This long list turned into the roadmap to the next version which I called Sparrow and should be done some time end of next week.


Fire Eagle - Application Gallery

While I was at the superb re:publica 09 in Berlin, someone somehow found EagleTweet and for a small service that I mostly just built for myself, it’s doing quite well. Especially, and I am all giggly very proud about it: It’s under Cool Apps on the official FireEagle App Gallery.

Obviously there are quite a couple of little bugs and I learned one thing in the last few days: The early/sudden release also started a bunch of really useful feedback from people who were willing to try it. And I am very grateful for that, thanks everyone.


Hello world!

04Apr09

EagleTweet

Now here is a blog. I might have something to say about EagleTweet once in a while that doesn’t fit into 140 characters – so I’ll do that here. Everything else goes straight to @eagletweet




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