infinimedia

So it was a year and a week ago that we launched Twitbin to the world. We’ve gone through a number of small iterations to the service (not as many major ones as I would have liked), and listened to a LOT of feedback along the way. I’d like to thank all of you for using the site/service and giving us feedback to help improve them.

So where are we now?
Well we’ve been used by 30,000+ twitter users over a grand total of 71 Million minutes of use. We have users in 40+ countries spanning the globe (most in the US, canada, and brazil) who have collectively posted hundreds of thousands of tweets.

So where are we going?
Well we’ve been planning twitbin v2.0 for a while, and we know there is a lot more competition in the twitter client space now than there was when we launched. So how do we make it better than ever? How can we make this the best tool for using twitter period.

One of the things we’ve been talking about a lot lately has been how to improve the twitter and twitbin experiences through twitbin.com. We’re working on some ways to enhance the functionality of our application and hopefully build a closely knit community here as well. Ultimately though, we want to see what you all think would make the best possible twitter client (it doesn’t even have to be a twitter-only, but lets not get crazy, we do this for fun).

Here is the short list of things we’re planning on doing:

• Speeding up the system (re-architecting everything from the ground up)
• Improving tweet storage (so you can get more than 20 tweets at a time)
• Making it more portable (going beyond just firefox)
• Integrating community tools (make it easier for you to manage your twitter friends)

How can you help?
The best way to help us build a new twitbin is to send us feedback. So if you have any suggestions, ideas, or feedback, please post it here or to our getsatisfaction site.

So we decided to publicly release our latest plugin which offers support for the latest firefox beta release. There are a number of bugs in it, and we highly recommend you sending them to us, either via this post or via twitter (@twitbin).

So you can grab the xpi directly from the homepage whenever you feel like it.

Cheers,
Brian

Update:The plugin has been released into the wild on the homepage. Just click on the link to install. works with up to 3.0b4. several bugs are still in need of working out.

So lots of you have been asking for FF3 support. Well we’ve been rewriting our extension to work with 3.0b3, which is kinda buggy at the moment, but we would still like to get some of you to help us test it.

So if you’d like to test it, please post a comment here and include your twitter username so we can send you the super secret link to the XPI.

Known bugs: if twitbin is open when your window opens it won’t load no matter how many times you reopen it. You have to close it, then reopen the firefox window and then reopen twitbin. This should be fixed when the next beta comes out.

Also in preparation for SXSW next week, Twitter is lowering the hourly API requests you can each make from 70 to 50. So if you get the annoying “you’ve exceeded twitter’s hourly request limit” then you know why. We suggest setting your reset to 5 minutes or 10 minutes to avoid this. Also if you are in texas for SXSW next week, please d msg us (twitbin) so we can meet you all!

Another thing, if you’re an IE7 user, and want to test our IE7 plugin, let us know in the comments by saying which one you’d like to try out. (It is also buggy, but since we’re mac users we couldn’t do much to fix it).

Thanks everyone!
Brian (@brbreslin)

So I figure I won’t bore you all with the goings on on twitbin this month, things have been rather quiet on this front. We’ve been busy working on stuff for clients, and our own projects.

So I think I’d like to open this up to discussion. We’ve got several ideas we’re kicking around, and we want to see what you like best. I’d like to see what you all would like to see from twitbin. Here are some of our ideas:

• multiple skins/themes
• desktop version (using adobe air)
• internet explorer 7 support (note this is actually built, but we have no clue how to fix a major bug we found, so if you’d like to help us, please shoot me an email brian[at]twitbin.com
• a twit this tool to let you share whatever you’re looking at
• more advanced twitter tools (these would require you to manage the options on twitbin.com)
• ad-free version (we’re thinking $20/year?)

So what do you all think?

For those of you curious, we did just pass 19,000 users and 35 Million minutes of use since may.

Some of you may have noticed that we’ve put in a new alert to notify you when you’ve exceeded the maximum requests threshold given to us by Twitter. This means we are allowed to make 70 api calls per hour, per user. So there are a couple ways you can solve this issue, easiest is to reduce your refresh frequency to 10 minutes instead of 3 (we’ll add a 5 minute and 7 minute intervals later today), the other way to solve it is to just leave twitbin open, as it reduces the calls to twitter (we close the session each time you close/open the window).

We’re going to work on reducing the number of requests, so you are less likely to run over the limit, but please bare with us for the time being.

Dear Twitbin users,
It came to our attention yesterday that we had made a mistake in the way we were writing the cookies to your computers. Turns out since we were trying to do it all via Javascript, we didn’t encrypt the cookies the way we should have. We have since rectified the issue and released a new version patching this and a couple other bugs we found along the way. Now your cookies will be encrypted so as to protect your username/passwords.

For those of you wondering, the old version left your cookies open to reading if someone ever managed to access your local computer’s cookie folder. Since we don’t store any of your personal data, it meant that your own computer would have to be compromised for this to affect your security. However, this is still no excuse for us having overlooked this before (we just didn’t think of it), and for that we apologize.

So to make sure you are using the latest version, please clear your cache and cookies and you should have your cookies replaced next time you log back in.

Thank you for your patience and using twitbin.
Brian Breslin
CEO infinimedia

Hey Folks,
Just wanted to let you know that despite the blog being quiet, we are steadily working on some new stuff in the background here. We have some new tweaks coming in the next week or so, they were thanks to suggestions from one of our Twitter users in Brazil (thx Bruno). So what can you expect in the next few weeks? Well first we’ll be unveiling those minor enhancements we talked about, second we are working on a new plugin that will allow more people to use twitbin wherever they want, and last we have an slight overhaul of the site coming that will coincide with another related product launch we’re doing.

So we also have some updates on the health of Twitbin. We have broken the 13,000 user mark (unique twitter users), and over 21.2 Million minutes of use to date.

More updates soon!
- Brian

What’s up twitterverse?

So we know that in the past three weeks we’ve had a few issues, that we attempted to fix live. Worked out rather smoothly, and hopefully everyone is still with us. We really appreciate you guys for patience.

We did receive numerous emails regarding Twitbin being down last week, and it was in fact Twitter’s API that was acting up. If you ever notice that Twitbin is down, feel free to visit http://twitter.com/twitter_status which will let you know whether it’s Twitter that is having issues, or ourselves, at which point, please contact us and let us know.

So we know that there was a bug on the first post which didn’t allow new tabs to open. This has been fixed and will be uploaded as soon as i finish posting this. Make sure to clear your cookies to see the changes, as this may help.

We are also days from launching Twitbin for IE7. It’s been a long journey to make it as good as Firefox. Twitbin has been optimized for Firefox but with a few modifications, we were able to get it to be a similar product on IE7. The launch of it will be partnered with a blog posting detailing all the info and differences between the IE7 version and the Firefox version.

So again, thanks for all your patience and dedication to Twitbin. As always, if you have any information on issues or bugs you notice, please email me and I’ll get on it ASAP, as most of you know. Also, ideas are greatly appreciated, since we build Twitbin for our users, not ourselves.

-Xavier
Currently 10,774 users

So last night, we launched the latest version of twitbin, and I wanted to breakdown the new details. You’ll immediatly notice the time stamps now as well as a little box next to some names. The box with the arrow is a direct link to that person’s personal homepage.

If you go to preferences, you will also notice that three things have changed. For starters, we have changed the refresh options. They are now 3, 10, 30, and 45. We chose these becuase they were the most demanded refresh times.

The second change is the @ Messages preference. This will list all your @ Messages in the sidebar, so as to allow you to sort through them.

The final change is the D messages preferences. Just like the @ Messages, this will allow you to see all the dmessages that were sent to you.

If you don’t see any of these changes on your twitbin, just clear your cache, and they will appear. As always, we want to hear from the users, so please, feel free to leave a comment here on what you think about the latest version.

Enjoy!

For those of you using Flock, you might have noticed the newest version 0.9 was released yesterday (along w/a whole new site). We were quick to download and test twitbin on it, and despite it saying its not designed for flock, it seems to work perfectly. So feel free and use twitbin with flock!

happy twittering!