How Jeremiah and I know each other is a pretty odd story. Back in 2002, he appeared in one of Apple’s ’switcher’ commercials. I emailed him at the time, then we kept very intermittently in touch until 2007, when I moved to California. We found we have a lot in common, and started talking (mostly via his Twitter stream) about webdev, politics, and more. We finally met in person in 2009 when I visited L.A., where he lived until last month.

Since 2002 JC has been busy writing, coding, founding his own app company — oh, and surviving a helicopter crash into San Francisco Bay (really! You can read about it on his Wikipedia page). I was always very impressed with his combination of design talent and coding skill, as well as his entrepreneurial drive, and Jonathan felt similarly when they met at BarCamp LA last year. So when the time came to hire a front-end developer for awe.sm, he was one of the first people we thought of.

Now he’s been on the team more than 3 months already (yikes! Time flies when you’re having fun) and we couldn’t be happier. He’s built our beautiful new front-end (still in beta!), so perfectly that Jonathan once mistook the working site for the photoshop mock-up — what better compliment could a web developer receive?

Jeremiah’s blogged about his own feelings about the job and the move to San Francisco a while back, so all that remains is to say, finally: welcome on board

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!

The new guy (more on that soon), Jeremiah (@jeremiahlee) and I (@jhstrauss) will be at Chirp all week, starting with the Prechirp party we’re co-sponsoring that’s happening *right now* at 550 3rd Street in SOMA. We’ll be at the conference all day tomorrow and participating in the hack day on Thursday.

Laurie (@seldo) will be at MySQL Conference all this week and will be attending StreamCamp over the weekend (and coding in between ).

If you’re going to be at any of these events and you want to talk about joining our team, using our products, or building cool tools on our APIs or you just want a sticker, please find one of us and say hi.

I first met Laurie when we hired him to join the Yahoo! Widgets team in early 2007. While I’m not sure he always felt the same way, I liked Laurie from the start: he’s extremely intelligent and hard-working, yet he’d be the last person to acknowledge either. And most importantly to me, he loves what he does and takes great pride in it. I know that if I can convince Laurie to get excited about something, it’s a genuinely good idea.

When I decided to start down this road, Laurie was my first choice as technical co-founder. I remember taking him to dinner and telling him the idea and being greatly relieved when he thought I might be on to something . Unfortunately, U.S. immigration law prohibited Laurie, a UK citizen who was at the time on an L-1 visa with Yahoo!, from joining right away. So, after going it alone (with much help from our friends at Cloudspace) for over a year and more hoop-jumping than I care to think about right now, I can’t express how pleased I am to finally be working side-by-side with the partner I wanted.

Laurie brings to the team the technical expertise to turn our early efforts into scalable platforms, the passion for the web to help us deliver truly compelling products, and the patience to deal with me . We’re both very excited about what we’re building and how we think it will be valuable to others.

You can read Laurie’s much more eloquent account of how we got here and where we’re going on his blog. And if you find the challenges we faced in teaming up as ridiculous as we do, please support the Startup Visa movement (Laurie will be blogging a fuller account of his immigration odyssey just as soon as we ship a couple new things ). Finally, we’re also looking for a kick-ass Back-End Engineer to join our growing team. So, please spread the word.

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.

It looks like the bootcamp is sold out, so I’ll see you there if you’ve already booked. Otherwise, feel free to get in touch if you’d like to meet up at the show or in the city: I’m @jhstrauss on Twitter or jonathan [at] snowballfactory.com.

As part of Facebook’s button release, they also announced a new API for pulling the share data directly from them. They were kind enough to give us a preview of this API, and we actually launched a new version of our button using the combined Facebook and awe.sm share data over the weekend. Here’s what’s new:

• Uses combined share data from Facebook and awe.sm for the most complete stats
• Cleaner look and slightly taller (9px) large button (it is now 53px wide by 69px tall)
• Ability to customize the background and text colors of the badge in the large button
• When there are no shares, the badge in the large button is clickable as a sharing interface

We also upgraded our WordPress Plugin to accommodate these changes and include some user requests:

• Support color customization in plugin
• Added the ability to disable the button from appearing on Pages (vs Posts)
• Improved plugin performance by eliminating javascript

At this point, our version of the button is primarily targeted at existing awe.sm publishers. But, there are a few reasons other folks might want to use it over the Facebook version:

• You think ours is purdier
• You like our WordPress Plugin
• You want to use the Google Analytics integration

Please let us know if you have ideas on how we can make the button even more useful.

1) In the Tweetie Settings, select Custom URL Shortener and you’ll get a screen like this:

2) Enter the following string replacing ‘{YOUR API KEY}’ with your awe.sm API Key (if you don’t have an awe.sm API Key yet, we appreciate your continued patience):
http://create.awe.sm/tweet?create_type=tweetie&api_key={YOUR API KEY}&target=%@

3) When writing your tweets, enter the Compose Menu and click the Shrink URLs button as seen here:

This will create awe.sm-powered URLs using whatever custom domain you have as your account default with the channel (share_type) ‘twitter’ and tool (create_type) ‘tweetie’.

If you’re a developer interested in integrating awe.sm support into your app, please check out our API documentation and feel free to drop us a line at developers [at] awe.sm.

A few weeks back I decided to build a button for my blog that would give me the same functionality of ‘retweet’ buttons, like the ones from TweetMeme and Backtype (both of which support awe.sm by the way ), for sharing on Facebook.

I built it in a weekend on top of our powerful Aggregate Data API, and then we decided some other folks might like it too. So, we put up a little splash page and started quietly asking people to test it. Mashable was the first major blog to launch it this past weekend, and were very helpful in providing feedback. You can now also find it live on The Next Web, and grab it for your own site at fbShare.me.

What it does:

• Displays the number of shares and on hover the total number of clicks for those shares (displays Facebook logo when 0 shares)
• Gives you a choice between a large or small button
• Tracks the shares from the button using your awe.sm API Key or fbShare.me links
• Allows you to add Google Analytics parameters to fbShare.me links

Please note, this is NOT an officially endorsed Facebook tool. It doesn’t have special access to secret Facebook APIs that tell you how many times a link has been shared on Facebook. The count and click numbers are only for share actions that happen via awe.sm. In addition to the shares that occur through the fbShare.me button, any that happen through other awe.sm-enabled sharing or syndication tools, like Sociable, AddToAny, and TweetPo.st, will also be counted.

We put this out there because we thought it was cool and hoped others would find it useful. It is also a great reference implementation for the kinds of valuable sharing tools that can be built on top of the awe.sm APIs. awe.sm is a social media campaign tracking platform for publishers, and we want to offer them the broadest selection of syndication and sharing tools possible. Our real value isn’t in building our own tools, it’s in helping the developers of the thousands of great tools out there offer publishers a way to connect those individual solutions together to form a cohesive system.

Our hope for fbShare.me is that it will inspire more great tools developers to incorporate awe.sm-powered functionality into what they’re building. So if you’re working on a social media syndication or sharing tool for publishers, please check out our APIs and feel free to drop us a line at developers [at] awe.sm.

Unfortunately, we’re going to have to continue to limit access to the beta for the foreseeable future. We’re a small team with a new product and our primary focus continues to be on delivering the best possible experience to our existing users. We currently communicate very closely with all of our customers to understand their needs and how we can improve the product to best serve them. Obviously this is quite a labor-intensive process, but we firmly believe it is the quickest route to delivering a great product to everyone else.

We truly appreciate your patience and are seriously bummed not to be able to give more folks access yet. If you’ve already filled out the survey, there’s no need to do so again. And if you want to discuss anything with us, drop a line to support[at]awe.sm (though please allow a couple days for a response). Please note if you’re a developer interested in exploring our APIs, we’re being a bit more liberal about granting access to http://developers.awe.sm so go ahead and apply.