* Update: We’ve suspended new signups on TweetPo.st until further notice. Full details here. *
I’m very happy to announce we have begun private beta testing the new version of TweetPo.st. I’ll include the full back-story below, but I personally apologize for the lack of communication on TweetPo.st the last few months and for any frustration it may have caused. We’re really excited about the new version because, in addition to being able to take on new users again, we have added support for Facebook Pages, our top requested feature.
TweetPo.st is a smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter. Here are the key features of the new version:
- Post tweets as Facebook Status Updates
- Post links you tweet on your Facebook Wall (so your friends can watch videos and see pictures right in their News Feed)
- Ignore @replies
- Change @mentions to real names
- Only post the tweets you specify to Facebook (using either inclusive or exclusive filters)
- Track links posted to Facebook with awe.sm
- *NEW* Supports both Facebook Profiles and Pages
- *NEW* Manage multiple posting configurations from Twitter accounts to Facebook Profiles or Pages
While we’re eager to get as many people using the new version of TweetPo.st as soon as possible, we need to limit the number of users until we work out all the kinks. We don’t anticipate this private beta period lasting more than a couple of weeks, but feel free to email support [at] tweetpo.st if you’d like to help us test before then. Otherwise, please follow @tweet_post to be the first to know when it’s publicly available.
The Back-Story
About 4 months ago, we started seeing bug reports from users who were encountering errors signing up for TweetPo.st. It took some investigation, but we soon figured out that, due to the way we originally built the app (i.e. not using Twitter OAuth, which wasn’t available at the time), TweetPo.st had hit Twitter’s following/follower ratio limit. Without going into too much detail, this required us to completely re-architect TweetPo.st from the ground-up using Twitter’s new Streaming API.
Originally, we thought we’d get this all done in December. But, we’re a small team working on 3 products (awe.sm, TweetPo.st, and fbShare.me). So, sometimes things don’t happen as quickly as we’d like. However, we dropped the ball on communications in this case. We didn’t want to announce a revised schedule until we had one we felt we could stick to, and new things continued to come up that kept us from finishing TweetPo.st. So, instead we went radio silent, which was not the right thing to do.
We apologize for not handling the situation as well as we should. And we hope you find the new version of TweetPo.st worth the wait when we make it publicly available in the next few weeks.
Hi Jonathan,
I will love to be a beta user
it was fun meeting in web 2.0 expo, and since then i am a huge fun of what you guys do.
Good luck…
If your service works for users who don’t show up in twitter search, I too would love to be a beta tester =) But if it doesn’t, then there’s really no point, eh? =(
Hi Navarr. We are currently working on that issue. Unfortunately, it requires Twitter to make some changes on their side (see http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/9f5e05fe93516a74). But we may try to come up with a workaround in the meantime. However, it probably won’t make it in until we leave beta.
Curious how you’re gonna ensure you don’t miss anybody’s tweets while using the streaming API. Would have thought enforcing a mutual following of @tweet_post would be simpler and surer…
Hey Evan, we’re definitely feeling out the Streaming API and its reliability right now (hence the extended private beta). While the mutual following might be surer, it’s definitely not simpler (e.g. how do you handle a user subsequently unfollowing @tweet_post, etc). So at this point, I think we’re pretty committed to the Streaming API for public accounts + direct polling (via OAuth) for protected updates.
> we’re definitely feeling out the Streaming API and its reliability right now
Cool. Perhaps a future blog post on your experiences…
> how do you handle a user subsequently unfollowing @tweet_post
Would have thought you do a followers/ids API call periodically, and if they show up as missing a certain number of times in a row then unfollow them and stop forwarding their messages.
>> Would have thought you do a followers/ids API call periodically, and if they show up as missing a >> certain number of times in a row then unfollow them and stop forwarding their messages.
That could work, but it would suck for users who unintentionally unfollowed us or didn’t realize that unfollowing would result in TweetPo.st ceasing to work. Because unfollowing can happen disconnected from the TweetPo.st UI (i.e. it is normally done in Twitter), we fear users would not realize/forget about the connection between the action and the reaction.
As for a blog post on the Streaming API, we’ll have to figure it all our first
. One of the main things we’re working on is documented in the thread linked in my first comment above (http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/9f5e05fe93516a74). One of the better (if less technical) ones we’ve seen thus far is from our friends at Gnip: http://blog.gnip.com/2010/02/15/migrating-to-the-twitter-streaming-api-a-primer/.
Sometimes I want my @replies to go to Facebook. Is it possible that Tweetpost will ever have an option to choose this? Alternatively, will I have to use “.@reply” to post @replies to facebook?
Hey Adam, you can actually already do this by including ‘#fb’ anywhere in the tweet. All tweets containing ‘#fb’ will be posted to Facebook regardless of other conditions.
Hi Jonathan,
I just started using TweetPo.st yesterday. My first tweet to my FB fan page went well despite a short time lag but the tweet I posted this morning didn’t appear on FB at all. Any idea why and how I can make this work?
Thanks,
Gayle
Hi Gayle, we were experiencing *really* long delays over the last couple weeks. Those should be gone in the next few days and everything should be working correctly again.
I am trying to use tweetpo.st and am experience a long lag, which would be acceptable except that it is posting everything twice. Am I doing something wrong?
Hi Vicky,
We’re still working through some issues with Twitter and Facebook. Can you please email us your Twitter username to support [at] tweetpo.st so we can investigate further?
Thanks.
Hi,
1st of all: a great service you came up with!
Having issues though with forwarding to FB as well. I disabled my setup for the time being. I’m @thobu on Twitter.
Thanks
Thomas
Hi Thomas, thanks for the support and sorry for the delays. Things should be getting better now.
Love Tweetpo.st but it doesn’t appear to be working well at all. Some tweets I sent last night around 5pm CST finally hit my FB (in random order) after 11pm cst. Weirdness! Twitter username is @bizmark if that helps!
Hi Mark, we were having a bunch of issues the last couple weeks. But things should be working better going forward. Thanks for your support and patience!
Updates are still incredibly slow. It takes several hours for one to move from Twitter to Facebook. Any updates on when this might be fixed?
Hi Clay, thanks so much for your patience. The issue is now fixed and the lag times should be improving over the next few days.
I am too experiencing a long lag between my tweets and FB status’. It can take up to 10 hours before hitting my FB. Can you investigate this?
Hey Chris, thanks for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience. The delays should be going down (and staying down) as we speak.
If you guys can fix the time lag, this will seriously make my day. I’ve tried half a dozen apps to try to effectively and efficiently update Facebook fan pages from Twitter for the news organization I work for and they either don’t work the way I’d like or they’re just too damn complicated.
I LOVE your setup page. I’m not a techie and your setup page speaks my language. I have a friend who’s a Hootsuite fan and I’m trying that now because of the lag time, but I just don’t like it as much as twitterpo.st. Well, that is, if it worked a little more timely. A half-hour delay would be tolerable, but right now I’m seeing anywhere from four to 24 hours and by then, whatever I tweeted is old news. If you can fix this it would seriously make my day. The way it’s supposed to work is exactly the way I would have developed the app in my mind if I could have.
Hey Noah, thanks so much for your support and the kind words! We have fixed the issues that were causing the delays and we should be back to lag times measured in minutes (not hours) shortly. See our latest blog post for the full story.
[...] then. It was wasn’t until this February that we were able to go back in and basically build a whole new TweetPo.st from the ground up using the latest APIs from Twitter and [...]