We are disappointed to announce that we have closed TweetPo.st to new users until further notice. This was a hard decision for us, but our top priority is delivering a high quality user experience for our current users and this is the only way we can do that at this point.
If you have already signed up for TweetPo.st, you will continue to be able to use it and we hope most of the issues that have cropped up in the last few weeks will soon be fixed. If you haven’t yet signed up for TweetPo.st, we really appreciate your interest and hope to open back up soon (please follow @tweet_post to be kept up-to-date on our progress).
The brief history of TweetPo.st has been a series of lessons in building products on other people’s platforms. The first version (called TweetFace until Facebook made us change it a couple weeks after release) was basically a public prototype built in a week about a year ago. It grew out of our desire to have ‘a smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter’ for our personal use and we only did it because it seemed so easy at the time. We didn’t even tell anyone about it other than our friends, but somehow people started to notice. We were happy that folks liked it and even happier that we didn’t have to worry about it while we worked on other things.
But then last fall, we began to get reports of strange behavior when new people tried to signup. When we finally had time to do some serious investigation, it turned out that Twitter had changed things in a way that made it impossible for TweetPo.st to add any more new users without us having to basically rewrite most of it, which we didn’t have the time to do 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 Facebook.
Based on our research and planning, we blocked out a couple weeks to implement and test the new version. But very soon into it, we realized that things weren’t going to be that easy — specifically, some of the Facebook APIs we had planned to use were broken and all of them were really slow and/or unreliable. In practical terms, this meant we had to do a whole bunch of extra work and testing to make things work correctly for our users. Unfortunately, the very issue with the Facebook APIs is their unpredictability and so at a certain point we had to make a best guess at how to deal with it and then see what happened.
The good news is that after seeing how the application has performed (or not) in the real world over the last couple months, we have a better sense of the pattern of the underlying issues. The bad news is that the long-term fixes for these issues are again going to require significantly more time than we can give right now. So, we have made some smaller fixes that should restore performance for existing users in the coming days and we have decided to close TweetPo.st to new users until we can make the long-term fixes to properly support them.
We can’t tell you how much we appreciate the patience and understanding of our current users. We recently added Tilly to our team to help with customer care across all our products starting with TweetPo.st, and she has been totally impressed with how cool you all have been. And to anyone finding this because they want to use TweetPo.st, we’re even more bummed than you that we can’t let you in yet (and we recommend Selective Tweets as a lightweight alternative in the meantime). We only want to build products people love to use and sometimes that requires us to go for more love from fewer people. We’re hard at work on a new version of awe.sm, which is going to be our main focus for the next few months. And hopefully, we’ll be able to do some more work on TweetPo.st soon after that. Thanks again for your support!
Thanks, guys. My Facebook fan page updated from my tweet almost immediately this morning. You guys have some fabulous products and I can appreciate the difficulty in trying to fix bugs and adapt to other programs. I can’t wait until you’re able to reopen it and I can recommend it to my colleagues.
It’s good to see you guys address the issues head on and start to take care of them. Aside from the huge lag issue we’re all seeing a whole dump of images http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryno/4556990224/
Looking for a resolution sooner rather than later – even if it lessens the options available to me as a user. With the amount of stuff I tweet, FB ppl are starting to complain about the news feed dumps and have been on me about the lag issues
Hey Chuck, thanks so much for your support. This is a known issue, but your particular case is one of the most dramatic I’ve seen. Unfortunately, this is something we can’t really afford to fix right now. It stems from the fact that we had to build a workaround to the Facebook Links.post API that just stopped working for Pages in January and hasn’t reliably been fixed yet.
Our workaround (taking the data from Links.preview and using it as an attachment in Stream.publish) is obviously imperfect in that Links.preview can return multiple media attachments for some pages whereas Links.post only ever uses one. However, we found that Links.post has some additional secret logic for selecting the single media attachment it uses when the underlying page isn’t correctly tagged. We can’t just use the first image from Links.preview and have it work properly all the time, and we haven’t been able to figure out what the right way is to programmaticaly select the correct single media attachment.
So for now, we really apologize for the ongoing issue and understand if you need to switch to another tool. But for what it’s worth, this shouldn’t happen for any links to sites that have tagged their pages correctly for Facebook based on http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Share/Specifying_Meta_Tags.
If “We can’t just use the first image from Links.preview and have it work properly all the time” just means that there’s sometimes no image coming up – that would be more acceptable to me than having the photo dump.
Hey Alexander, we’ve since figured out that all the images are coming up all the time in other people’s view of your stream, which definitely makes this a much suckier issue (before, they had to click a ‘More’ link to see the additional images). So, it’s at the top of our list to fix as soon as we get back to TweetPo.st. Unfortunately, that will still be a couple months out. Sorry for the ongoing inconvenience.
I am a user of your application from months ago but right now I want to setup my account again I can access to set permissions on my facebook, Can you help me out?
Behzad.
Hi there. Tweetpo.st looks to be exactly what I’m looking for. Any news on when you’re going to be opening up to new users again?
Hope it’s soon.
Regards,
Trevor
Man, this is sad news. I know Facebook hasn’t been playing nicely with their new API changes… the Smart Twitter app I’d been using up until recently got broken too. I discovered TweetPost way too late into the game and won’t be able to use it just yet. Really hoping to see things progress so I can try it out. I love some of the features here, especially name resolution!